Crazies - Torchwood Style
by Awatere11
Summary: Was looking at my DVD collection and found another old favourite I watched to the point of damaging the disc. The town has some sort of illness that is making people ...well ... crazy. Jack must save his ittle family before they are all infected. Rated for violence and horror ... maybe I will slip a wee bit of smut in because ...well ...I can! A slow starter that really takes off
1. Chapter 1

1

It's just on dusk.

The crickets are letting off their lazy song of the day before the night frogs take over.

A baseball game being played under the lights behind the local high school.

The reassuring bubble covering the planet appearing like auroras borealis in the half light.

Locals fill the wooden bleachers. It's the regional playoffs. Everybody is here.

The Mayor Yvonne Hartman, the Pastor John Frobisher, the Fire Chief Oswald Danes, all the VIPs a small town has to offer.

Even the town sheriff has turned up for the end of the game. He parks his haver-cruiser in the overflow lot and comes down the hill to the diamond, keys jangling on his belt beside a holstered gun he never uses.

Jack Harkness is easy-going. Second-gen sheriff.

Pillar of the community.

Trading a dozen hellos, clapping some old timer on the shoulder who has his Planetary War Emblem proudly pined on his hat, giving the coach a thumbs-up about the score, he comes around the backstop to the little food stall.

Sets his hat on the counter.

Handsome.

Grinning with hometown pride.

"They're playin' well, Kev, they're playin' awful damn well. Win this one they could have a shot." Jack said to the Vendor, then nodded to his wife behind him "Hey Linda."

She nods hi and pours him a cup of coffee, on the house.

"Fryeburg's tough. They'd be next." Kev agreed.

"Fryeburg, yeah. Shit. Well, one at a time, one at a time..." Jack heads off, coffee in hand. "Thanks, Kev."

Jack leans on the sideline fence, sipping his coffee, watching the game. The star pitcher blows a fastball past the batter. Jack lets out a howl. "Scotty McLeod! You throw like you fly, son, too damn fast!"

He puts down his coffee so he can applaud the strikeout with both hands then picks it up again and takes another sip.

No one has yet noticed the stumbling man out in the shadowy woods beyond the outfield. Weaving like a drunkard, he walks right onto the playing field, oblivious to the game.

A man of fifty. Local pig farmer.

His name is Rhys Williams.

He is carrying a shotgun.

Heads turn, mouths falling open in the bleachers and dugouts, everybody staring in collective disbelief. It's surreal, a guy with a gun just walked past Pete Jenkins in left field.

"Rhys, what in God - ?" Jack drops his coffee and jumps the fence, goes out across the diamond to intercept him, hollering, waving his hands. "Rhys, whoa, Rhys, Rhys, whoa, whoa, whoa!"

Rhys Williams gets as far as the infield before Jack, cutting in front of him now, keeping ten feet of distance, finally gets his attention.

" STOP I SAID!" Jack roars and Rhys stops, glassy-eyed, head lolling sickly to one side. Jack keeps his gun holstered, tries to reason with him.

The players frozen at their positions on the field.

"What the hell you doing, Rhys? Huh? Got a ball game going on here. We're playing ball, you come out here with a gun?" Jack pants with confusion, "The goddamn hell you doing?"

Rhys casts a glance around the field.

A dizzying number of faces out there.

All eyes on him.

He wobbles a little, catches himself.

"Lay it down, Rhys, you're drunk." Jack soothes.

His gaze floats back to Jack and it's different than it was a moment ago. Harder. Deadly. Jack is not a man easily spooked, but that look sends a chill right through him.

"Lay it down!" Jack had his hand on his gun stock now, this is not looking good.

Rhys takes a wavering step forward. Jack draws his weapon. Rhys responds in kind, leveling his.

People gasp. Jack retreats a step.

Might be the first time in his life he's had a gun pointed at him by someone ready to use it.

"Don't do it, Rhys! Don't you do it!" Jack cries, but Rhys brings his eye to the sights, draws back on the trigger and Jack shoots first.

A single shot, but a deadly one.

Rhys Williams collapses midfield.

A body, face down in the grass behind the pitcher's mound, Sheriff Jack Harkness standing over it, astonished, holding in his hand the gun he never uses.

.

.

.

.

The stillness of long grass in the blue hush before dawn.

Beyond it, a traditional earth style white weatherboard house with an old barn that needs painting.

In the house a young man awakens to find his partner's side of the bed empty.

Runs a hand over the sheet, checking for body warmth. It's cold.

Strange.

He puts on a robe.

He comes downstairs in the darkened house. "Babe...?"

No reply.

Worried, he comes down the hall into the kitchen.

No sign of him.

He startles at a movement behind him.

It's just the door swinging back and forth in a draft.

He comes over to close it and sees, through the screen, his partner sitting alone outside in the shadowy dawn.

It's Jack out here, second-guessing himself.

His husband sits down quietly beside him, come to lend a sympathetic ear.

If he is one pillar of the community, Ianto is the other, a local standout who came back from med school to be the town doctor.

"He didn't give me a choice." Jack says softly.

Ianto shakes his head in reassurance of that fact.

Takes his hand for moral support.

Looks to the distance, reflecting. "You asked me once when we first got together if I thought less of you for staying here on this rock after high school and following in your dad's footsteps. I want you to know something. People like you, the ones that stay, are the reason why people like me come back."

Jack meets his gaze, heartened by that, and then places his hand gently, tellingly, on his midsection.

"You should be sleeping."


	2. Chapter 2

2

Jack's cruiser travels through the lonesome countryside.

He turns at the post with WILLIAMS blinking holographically, into the drive of a rundown farmhouse on the outskirts of town.

Poorest family in Ogden Marsh.

The cruiser stops and sinks to the ground and Jack is getting out, Jack meets eyes with two boys feeding pigs behind the barn.

Jacob and Keiren.

Rhys' teenage sons.

Tough kids, but they've both been crying. Before Jack can say anything they turn coldly away.

He goes up the front steps to the house.

Takes off his hat, knocks.

The door opens to reveal Rhys' widow, Gwen.

Awkward is an understatement.

Jack is the last person she expected to see on her doorstep this morning.

"Gwen, I... " Jack hesitated, "I knew what I was gonna say before I got here... I'm real sorry, Gwen. I liked Rhys, I liked him a lot."

Whatever resentment she might have harbored is defused by Jack's simple decency.

Looking him in the face, she just crumbles. "What was he doin'? What was he doin'?"

Jack holds her, the only thing keeping her upright.

Together in their anguish, the town sheriff and the wife he made a widow.

.

.

.

.

A lone street light flashes yellow on Main Street. It will do that all day.

An A & P, a post office, a bank.

No frills.

No artifice.

Like the people that live here.

Jack's cruiser pulls up outside

C. R. Billis Funeral Home which doubles as the town morgue.

Inside Billis and the town pastor are discussing funeral arrangements in the dimly-lit foyer. Jack enters and they go silent, unintentionally.

"Pastor, Charlie..." Jack nods..

" I'll talk to the family, see if that schedule suits them." The pastor sweeps out and pats Jack's arm as he exits, a gesture of solidarity.

Jack comes over to Billis.

An odd man whose bony features reflect the grim solitude of his trade.

"Doc Whosian still here?"

" Was a minute ago." He was told.

"Charlie, whatever the costs are for the funeral, bill comes to me, all right?" Jck demands and Billis nods okay. Jack heads for the back.

A pen writes: "Aorta ruptured - fatal wound: gunshot..."

The Doctor Whosian, balding, bespectacled, finishing his autopsy notes.

Jack walks over.

A body sheeted in plastic on the autopsy table.

Tag on the toe: WILLIAMS, RHYS C.

"Just wanted to get his blood/alcohol, put in my report." Jack says softly as he fingers the card.

" Zero-point-zero."

"Come again?" Jack gapes.

"Zero-point-…"

"I heard what you said. Doctor, that's not right, he was drunk." Jack insists with confusion.

The Examiner shakes his head.

Collects his things to go.

"Checked it twice. Rhys was a drinker, but not last night." He says sadly as he exits.

Jack, baffled, peels back the sheet and studies the corpse like it might offer clues.

But there is only the grim reality of death.

The tell-tale Y-shaped incision sutured shut across the torso.

And the small black hole his bullet made.

.

.

.

.

Small, functional and second home to Jack is his Sherriff's Office.

Jack's lone deputy is fielding phone calls in the common area.

Deputy Andrew (Call me Andy)Davidson.

Young. Capable.

Built like a streak of piss.

He'd be sheriff if Jack weren't around but his loyalty is absolute.

"I can't answer that - look, like I said, you'll have to talk to Sheriff Harkness, try back later." Davidson calmly speaks down the phone and Jack enters as he hangs up.

"Hey Jack."

"Andy" Jack goes into his office.

Sorts through the mail on his desk.

Davidson follows, only as far as the doorway, stands there for a moment gauging the climate. "Some fuckin' ball game, huh."

Jack sits down, nods. "Yeah."

He puts his head on the desk and Davidson quietly shuts the door.


	3. Chapter 3

3

Jack is back at the school the next day.

Humble brick building with a sign out front.

Home of the Wild Dergols.

"So you all saw something last night I sure wish you hadn't..." Jack talks calmly into a microphone, addressing the student in general assembly.

The hall is air-conditioned but he is sweating like a kerfip.

" ...Hard to make sense of it, even for me. Talk to your teachers, talk to me if you want... We don't have all the answers, but we're here to help."

.

.

.

Post assembly, Jack walks down the hall with the Principal. Students swarm past back to class. Flirting.

Life returning to normal.

"Wasn't so long ago you were roaming these halls. That hell raiser turned into a sheriff somehow. And a fine one." The large man says softly "Your mom and dad still liking the Peninsular okay?"

"Yeah." Jack snorts, "Dad swore he wouldn't last a month down there. Then he saw the golf courses."

They come past a teacher who can't unlock his classroom door.

Mid-forties.

Shirt and tie.

Native Boeshanian.

Billy Fletcher.

"Bill...?"

" I give up. They rekey the locks this weekend? Maybe it's jammed..." Billy says angrily.

He tugs on the door, mystified.

But no one is more mystified than Jack and the Principal.

"Bill, you don't … you retired, five years ago." The Principal looks at Jack with open surprise as

Billy looks at them in utter confusion.

Rubs his nose and his finger comes back with a bloody smear on it. The Principal offers a handkerchief as he walks Billy away, gesturing to Jack 'I got it'. "Hit your head or something? Come on, why don't you sit down in my office."

Jack watches them go, the tide of students flowing past him.

.

.

.

.

Jack stands at the fence staring at the empty field, dismayed.

Two craft fly past high overhead.

Side by side a half mile apart.

Jack glances up, barely noticing.

Sees the coffee cup he dropped is still lying there in the grass. Tosses it in the trash can before heading up the hill to his cruiser.

The craft flying over the prairie at ten thousand feet. Beautiful view. Farms. Open fields. A sudden burst of holo pics rips the entire county into a series of single shots.

.

.

.

.

Small town life.

Families in the local pizza joint.

Guy washing his truck.

Woman walking her dog on an empty road.

The medical Centre is a single-story brick-and-mortar building with two hover cars in the lot.

Ianto, in a traditional white doctor's coat, gives a tetanus shot to a boy with a bandaged tentacle.

He has a gentle touch. "Wasn't too bad, was it?"

The boy shakes his head. He and his mother stand to go.

"Adventure on, young man, but keep an eye out for...?" Ianto says as he strokes the child's face.

"Rusty nails." The boy smiles back at one of his favorite people.

"Rusty nails. Ianto agrees and turns to the mother, "Take care, Dana. Let me know if there's any swelling."

She waves a tentacle and shoos her little beast out of the room.

Typical slow night.

Ianto is updating records with her part-time office helper Carys Flectcher.

Seventeen.

Pretty.

Local honor student.

Andy Davidson's baby sister.

"Started talking about names yet?" she asks ans Ianot grimaces.

"Not yet."

"If it's a girl, I like Beatrice. If it's a boy, Morton. Knew a Morton once, 'course we all called him Morty, maybe you should just go with Morty."

" Thanks, Carys, I'll put those on the list." Ianto tries not to giggle at the thought of Jack's reaction.

Carys's cell phone beeps. She checks the message, keys in a quick reply and resumes work, the entire exchange lasting ten seconds.

"Okay if I leave a little early tonight?" she asks after a while.

Ianto, playing, scans the empty waiting room. "Hmmm, how's our staff to patient ratio? I think you're good. Everything all right?"

"Yeah. Casey Strouten's having some people over."

"Algebra?"

"Yep. Math party." She shudders and Ianto laughs.

" My husband excelled at math in high school."

Carys smiles. "Oh, by the way, he was really cool at assembly today."

"Thanks."

"It's so scary to think what would've happened if he hadn't been there the other night." She says and Ianto nods her agreement.

"Sometimes you just get lucky like that." Ianto sighs as he wonders at the irony of the statement.

.

.

.

.

Johnny Davies stands in the corral watching, ankle deep in mud, briefcase in hand, blank expression.

His wife Rhiannon calls to him from the house porch in the doorway of the house, twelve-year-old son David under her arm.

"Johnny?"

If he hears her, he gives no visible indication. David jogs down to the fence.

"Supper's ready." David says and Johnny stands motionless, mesmerized. David starts to climb the fence and suddenly his father speaks, without looking, as though he was listening all along "Be in in a sec."

David heads back to the house.

Johnny picks his way across the muddy pen to the salt lick. Surrounded by mooing cows, he stares at it - brick-shaped, pinkish white, dripping with bovine saliva - then bends and gives it a long disgusting lick.


	4. Chapter 4

4

Crescent moon.

Jack eyeing it from the back porch as he drinks a beer in his unbuttoned sheriff's shirt.

Ianto enters the kitchen behind him. Weary from the day. Sees him through the door.

Jack holds his gaze for a moment then puts his hand under his shirt and gives it a little flutter, meaning his heart still beats for him.

Makes Ianto smile.

They kiss by the old gas stove. He brushes a lock of stray hair from Ianto's face.

Married his dream.

"Hungry?" Jack asks and Ianto nods "What do you want?"

"Omelet?" Ianto shrugs.

"Sit." Jack demands and Ianto does do with a soft woof.

Ianto at the table is soon eating his omelet.

Jack sitting opposite, polishing Ianto's wedding band on his shirt.

A ritual of his.

"Could drive you up to see your parents this weekend, if you want." Jack offers.

" Penance for your sins?" Ianto snorts, knowing the little love lost between Jack and them.

Jack smiles a little, slips the ring back on Ianto's finger, restored to its original luster.

Then, still troubled by the day's events "Thought maybe the moon was full, I don't know, definitely some weirdness going around. Doc Whosian said he found nothing in Rhys's system"

"Meaning - ?"

"Meaning, according to the state, the man I shot was sober." Jack huffs.

" What did Gwen say?"

"Saw him at lunch and he seemed fine." Jack sighs.

A mystery. Jack left with only his instincts.

And the memory.

"Looked him right in the eye. He was under the influence of something. If it wasn't alcohol it was something else." Jack insists and Ianto frowns as he nods.

.

.

.

At the Davies Ranch the cows moo behind the barn.

In the dark hundred-year-old house, past the stairs, down the hall into the kitchen, past an old potbellied woodstove to the sink where we find Rhia in a nightgown looking out the window.

Worried.

David enters in pajamas. "Pa come in yet?"

Rhia shakes her head no. Her eyes never leave the window.

David comes over, sees what she's staring at. "What's he doin'?"

Off in the distance, a combine harvester is going around in circles in a field, its spotlights sweeping the prairie like a lighthouse beacon.

Rhia takes a flashlight from the top of the fridge. "Wait here."

Rhia crosses the field, spotlights whipping across her face.

Lit up like a nebula against the night sky, the billowing dust cloud gives the combine an otherworldly aura.

A killing machine circling for prey, the thresher a gaping mouth of giant spinning teeth.

Up close, the noise is deafening. Rhia strides into range.

Cups her hands to her mouth and calls up to the darkened cab. "God Damn it Johnny!"

Through the windshield he can see her out there calling to him, disappearing from view as the combine goes around again.

Rhia calls once more then jogs over and climbs the metal rungs to the cab. Opens the door.

Johnny William Blaine Davies, what in heaven's …"

A haunted pause then Rhia slides in behind the wheel. Powers down the engine. Turns off the lights.

The big machine grinds to a halt and there's a hush. Rhia climbs down.

Scans the dark, windswept fields.

"Johnny?" Her voice carries without answer.

She turns on the flashlight and walks out into the field.

The swaying wheat. The pulse of cicadas.

And then, from back at the house, a blood curdling scream. Her son.

"Oh God..." Rhia takes off running for the house. Frantic. Elbows flying.

"DAVID?!"

Another scream. Rhia, in full flight, screams back.

"DAVID?!"

She crosses the field at a dead sprint.

And hears something worse than a scream as she reaches the house.

SILENCE.

She runs up the steps. In the front door.

She slows as she comes down the dark hallway.

No sign of her son.

No sign of her husband.

"David...?"

Silence. At the top of the stairs –

A hanging light swings like a pendulum, casting eerie shifting shadows.

Rhia looks up the stairs at it.

No sane person would go up there, except a mother for a child.

Thank God Micha is on a sleep over.

She climbs the stairs. Slowly, one step at a time.

The old boards creak underfoot.

The bulb's shadows move back and forth across her face.

Topping the stairs, she comes down the hall. Eyes wide with fear. Shadows dancing. The light is on in the BATHROOM. Door closed.

Rhia reaches out a hand, pushes the door slowly open - CREEEEEAK - and sees...

She looks down the hall.

Darkness at the other end.

Voice trembling, she calls into it. "David...?"

As she takes her next step she is grabbed from behind, a hand is thrown over her mouth and pulls her into the closet.

David. Terrified.

He gestures for silence, takes his hand from Rhia's mouth. Their pale faces lit by the light coming through the crack.

"What happened? What did he do? David, answer me." She hisses.

"He has a knife."


	5. Chapter 5

5

A chill runs through Rhia.

" We can't stay here." She cracks the door, peers out. Just then, a terrible sound.

Someone stomping, coming heavily up the stairs.

And now they have no choice but the closet. David shuts the door and grips the handle with both hands, praying he's strong enough to keep his father out.

Johnny climbs the stairs into view.

He is holding a knife.

Rhia helps David hold the door as Johnny comes pounding down the hallway to the closet where they stop.

Five seconds that feel like forever as Rhia and David listen to Johnny's harsh breathing on the other side of the door.

Both clutching the door handle, expecting it to get ripped open any second.

Instead they hear a key go into the lock and turn - CLICK.

Then he heads back downstairs. David tries the handle a couple of times before turning gravely to his mother. "He locked us in."

Slinging gasoline everywhere, Johnny walks out the front door. Empties what's left in the five-gallon can onto the porch and lights it with a match.

He sits down in the yard and watches it burn.

Devoid of emotion.

The house his grandfather built when the family settled on this planet.

His wife and son screaming from within as blue flames scurry up the inside walls.

.

.

.

.

A ringing phone wakes up Jack and Ianto.

They both reach for it.

Jack's hand gets there first. "Harkness..."

He sits bolt upright, registering the news. "I'm coming."

Jumps out of bed.

Ianto does the same before he even knows why.

"Your sister's, the whole place is going up." Jack barks and Ianto dresses quickly.

.

.

.

.

Engulfed.

Volunteer Firemen hose down the trees, too late to save the house or anyone inside.

Jack's cruiser pulls up.

He and Ianto push through the crowd of onlookers to the Fire Chief.

"Norman, did they get out?!" The Fire Chief shakes his head. Ianto, horrified, eyes the inferno that used to be a farmhouse.

"Johnny did. Begs the question, doesn't it?" Norman says softly to Jack.

Jack takes his meaning.

Crosses to where Johnny sits on the back bumper of a fire truck, expressionless, hands tied with baling twine.

"What happened, Johnny?" Jack asks his brother-in-law.

Johnny doesn't respond.

Jack squats in front of him, getting in his eye line. "Johnny, what happened here tonight?"

Johnny meets his gaze, glassy-eyed, remorseless. "A reckoning."

Madness. Jack staring it in the face.

The burning house from ten thousand feet.

Tiny, almost beautiful. Fire engines flashing around it like a child's toys.

The sound of Ianto sobbing.

.

.

.

.

Next morning, Davidson is outside trying to placate some local press as Jack talks on the phone.

"Was hoping to transfer him, we're not really equipped for this sort of thing. Okay, two o'clock." Jack hangs up.

A haunted pause.

The last forty-eight hours betraying everything he knows. He turns his gaze to Johnny who sits in a stupor in a holding cell at the back of the station.

Davidson enters. "They tell me they don't want the deputy, they want the sheriff."

Jack gets up from his desk. Still watching Johnny.

"Looked at me last night like he coulda slit my throat and barely known the difference." Jack says and turns to face Davidson "Same look Rhys gave me. Same goddamn look."

Walks out to talk to the press.

.

.

.

.

Plumes of smoke rise from the ashes.

A scorched brick chimney stands like a monument to the dead. Jack picks up a charred photo.

The family. He drops it, surveys the scene with dismay.

A faint droning hum draws his gaze skyward.

Those same two craft are flying over.

Side by side a half mile apart.

But lower this time.

Jack's eyes narrow with suspicion.

"What're you lookin' for?" he mutters.


	6. Chapter 6

6

A freshwater marsh on the outskirts, the town's namesake.

An old man in hip waders is dumping crayfish from wire traps into a bucket. He hears something. Straightens for a look.

Twenty yards away, something white is billowing like an untrimmed mainsail. He comes over for a look. Touches the material. Nylon. Billowing again, it's clear what it is... A parachute.

He follows the twisted cords over a rise in the marsh to where they settle in deeper water beyond. Gives the lines a tug and then staggers backwards in horror as a body floats to the surface.

Hideously discolored.

Bloated from decomposition.

"Lord God..." he cries

A military uniform. Oxygen mask on his face.

.

.

.

.

A body bag zipper opens to reveal the pilot's rotting corpse.

Jack catches a glimpse and turns away, he's seen enough. Andy gags at the stench. Even Billis, mortician of twenty years, looks a little grossed out.

"I'll see if there's any identification." Billis gulps.

Jack needs air "Yeah, do that."

Jack and Andy cough the stench from their lungs as they cross the parking lot.

"Got us a pilot, where's the plane?" Jack says and Andy, as they reach the cruiser, recollects: "John Hart - you know John?"

"I know he's a lyin' bastard." Jack snorts as he recalls his childhood friend.

"Said he heard something out by Hopelman Bog last week." Andy stops walking as he remembers "I thought he was tellin' stories again."

Jack slows, meets Andy's gaze over the roof of the cruiser.

Jack, Andy and John, a human rodent, motoring across the bog in a flat-bottomed aluminum boat.

"Sounded like a plane you said, huh, John?" Andy prompts.

"Yep. I gettin' paid for this?"

"Big plane, little plane?" Andy perseveres as Jack silently grinds his teeth.

" I dunno, a plane, I was on the shitter. So how much I gettin'?"

"John." Jack finally speaks.

"Yeah."

"Say that again you'll be the second person I shot this week."

John takes him at his word. Jack notices something up ahead.

Turns the boat toward it for a better look.

"Whaddaya see, chief?" Andy asks, craning to look.

Jack indicates a spot in the woods where the tops of trees have been sheared off. "Something came real close to taking a dip."

Jack kills the outboard and they drift in closer.

A strange toxic sheen to the water in this area.

Andy reaches two fingers down for a sample. Jack yanks Andy's hand back.

"Know what that is?" Jack snarks.

"No." Andy says with raised eyebrows.

"Then don't touch it." Jack bends for a closer look. The spill has that chemical rainbow quality of gasoline.

Jettisoned fuel perhaps.

He scoops some into a Mason jar.

Pauses as he screws on the lid. "It was a big plane."

"Why's that?" John asks as he and Andy shrug at each other.

Jack straightens, oddly quiet, staring at the water.

"'Cause we're right on top of it."

Submerged in the water where it crashed, the boat floating directly above is the craft.

.

.

.

.

.

Jack talks on a cell phone while he and Andy unhook the boat trailer outside the corrugated-steel equipment shed.

"Say, you folks missing a plane?" Jack speaks into his phone with brow furrowed "No? Well somebody oughta tell that to the pilot in our morgue. Military, yes, ma'am. Harkness. H-A-R-K-N-E-S-S. Yep, I'll be here."

He pockets the phone.

Stews.

"Plane that size goes down and there's nothing in the paper, nothing on the news? Make any sense to you?" he asks Andy who shrugs, unlocking the shed.

"Depends what the payload is."

It's an off-hand remark, means more to Jack than Andy. He looks at the jar of tainted water on the hood of the truck then turns a brooding stare to the north, a pattern of thought taking shape.

"The Bog, what's that drain into?"

" Dwyer Creek." Andy waves in the general direction.

"Which drains into...?"

"Black Pond. Hey, you remember that monster catfish I –" Andy grins but Jack cuts him off.

" Black Pond? Is that right?"

"Yeah..." Andy isn't following yet.

"Andy, where the hell you think we get our water from?"

.

.

.

A map of the county is on the wall of the town office.

The Marsh watershed shaded in blue. Jack barges in, asking his question on the fly. The town planner is eating lunch.

"Which way's the water flow through town?"

"Nice to see you, too, Dave. Waste water or drinking?" Jack says slowly.

"Drinking." Comes the reply.

Town Planner unfolds a chart, his finger tracing the main pipeline. "Comes in from the north, breaks east west..."

"Whose house does it get to first?" Jack leans over to look.

"Most outlying. Let's see, uh..." Runs his finger along a certain outlying route to a certain outlying farm. Looks up at Jack. "Rhys Williams."


	7. Chapter 7

7

With discreet alarm Jack shows Ianto the water system schematic at the reception desk. Points to the second most outlying farm.

"Next house is Johnny and Rhia's. I mean, am I talking nonsense here or is it possible they reacted to something they drank, something in the water?"

"If it's contaminated, if the concentration's high enough - but, Jack, we're drinking that same water. Everybody is. If there's something in it, we're all going to get it."

Jack backs away, crisis on his hands.

"It's a mile out, might not have made it this far yet. Tell everybody don't drink it." He runs out.

Ianto runs his finger from 'Davies Dairy' across town to the pipeline's end, five miles from Black Pond, a plot labeled 'Harkness Farm'.

He contemplates that distance, their safety buffer, then raises his gaze to the waiting room.

It's half full.

There is a woman sitting head slumped forward in the corner chair.

Ianto walks over, look of concern. Lifts the woman's chin. The widow, Gwen Williams, unconscious.

"Gwen? Can you hear me? Gwen...?"

Gwen's eyes flutter open partway. Pupils dilated. Barely conscious.

"You need to lie down?"

Gwen attacks without warning.

Knocks Ianto off his feet, tearing his shirt.

It takes three guys to pull her off and subdue her as Carys helps a badly shaken Ianto to his feet.

"What's gotten into her?" Carys splutters and looks over at Gwen Williams, held down, writhing and shrieking on the floor.

.

.

.

.

A white-bread bureaucrat saunters up the steps of her in-ground pool, toweling off after a morning swim.

Mayor Hartman.

"That water's contaminated I'm Hilary goddamn Kennedy-Obama."

Jack puts the jar of toxic water in her hand.

"I'm shutting it down, Vonnie."

" Shit." She mutters as she looks from the jar to the pool she just exited.

.

.

.

.

A worker muscles the wheel crank on a high-pressure pipe valve, shutting off the town's water. Done, he looks up at Jack from the hole he's in.

"Off."

.

.

.

Jack, driving back into town, lost in thought, listening to music on the radio.

 _News on the hour every hour. Fire crews in Southern California continue to battle wildfires this morning –_

The signal goes to

STATIC.

Jack gives the radio a glance.

Tries a different station –

STATIC.

Flips through all the stations –

STATIC.

Weird.

And then something weirder.

Out of the corner of his eye, barely seen in the blur of a passing field.

Whoosh.

A bio-hazard suit?

So incongruous it takes a moment to register.

What the hell?

He slams on the brakes. Backs up, craning his neck to see what he saw.

Can't see it from here. Stops the car.

Gets out and comes around the cruiser.

Surveys the field. Nothing there.

Nothing but prairie.

Jack stares across it, haunted, the radio in the cruiser

HISSING STATIC.

.

.

.

Jack enters his office, dazed.

"Either I'm losin' it completely or I just saw a guy in a spacesuit out by Hadley Road." Jack says to Andy who gestures over to his shoulder to the holding cell.

"That makes two guys losin' it."

Johnny is going nuts back there.

Smashing his head against the wall.

Tearing the cell apart. Uncontrollable rage. Jack, awed, steps to the windowed partition and watches.

Johnny turns. His face is hideous.

He hurls himself at the glass –

WHAM! –

almost shatters it.

Jack steps back as he goes berserk again. "Did we or did we not request a transfer to Wichitanga this morning?"

Rhetorical question.

He picks up the phone.

Starts to dial.

Toggles the receiver.

Line's dead.

"Yup."

Andy tosses him a cell phone.

Jack hits the first two digits then sees the viewscreen

\- "SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL..." –

Tosses it back.

"Even better." Jack snorts.

Andy frowns and steps outside, trying to get a connection.

Jack tries the tv.

WHITE NOISE.

Turns it off.

Clicks the computer mouse.

CANNOT FIND SERVER.

Tries the police scanner.

STATIC.

Switches it off, smiling at the improbability.


	8. Chapter 8

8

Davidson meantime can't get a signal.

Jack steps out beside him, surveys the town from the top of the steps.

His face black with foreboding.

"You know what..." Jack starts, then stops.

"What?" Andy turns to look at him.

" We're in trouble."

.

.

.

Jack's cruiser brakes to a halt at town center.

He gets out.

Scans Main Street.

An ominous calm.

The squeak of a bicycle chain turns his head.

An elderly lady pedaling toward him on a girl's pink tasseled banana-seat bike, singing in eerie falsetto, an old hymn.

" ...All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all..."

She rides past Jack, lost in her own world, her haunting song filling the silence.

\- From a block away, a camera captures the woman on the bicycle, then, panning to Jack, a second click captures him as he crosses Main Street, still watching the woman. As the photos continue snapping, he slowly turns, sensing he's being watched, and looks straight into camera...

Jack's face is impasive as he stands in the center of Main Street, staring at a black tinted hover idling at the corner by the bank.

Not a car that belongs to the Marsh.

Jack approaches, hand drifting instinctively toward his gun.

It tears off down the road.

Fantastic acceleration.

Jack stares for a moment, baffled. As he dashes back to his cruiser to give pursuit, a panicked woman jogs across the street from the pizza shop.

"Sheriff, we heard something from the funeral home little while ago."

"What'd you hear?" Jack demands.

"Screamin'."

A frozen moment.

Jack turns his gaze to the funeral home up the street.

Grabs his CB handset from the cruiser. Brings it to his mouth and clicks the button.

Dead.

"Lizzie, run down the station, tell Davidson what you just told me, tell him I need him asap."

She takes off running as Jack heads up the street to the funeral home, un-holstering his weapon for the second time in three days.

Closed for business.

Jack tries the front door.

Locked.

He goes around the back.

Where the bodies are brought in.

Jack enters, nervous, gun drawn. He stops and faces

Sterile. Eerily silent.

A few gurneys and unopened boxes of odorless body bags and cotton shrouds in the hall.

"Doc?"

No reply.

Jack comes slowly along, white-knuckled grip on his gun.

The hall is lined on both sides with closed doors. Jack comes to a door, turns the knob, opens it to reveal the embalming room.

Stainless steel embalming tables.

Sinks. Sluices. Rinse hoses dangling from the ceiling.

No bodies.

No Billis.

No Doctor.

Jack continues down the hall.

Comes through a door into the front of the shop.

Pink-hued walls. Liver-colored carpet.

Jack pushes open another door.

Caskets.

darkly polished. On display. Jack steps in, scans the room. All the caskets are open except

One.

He crosses to it. With a silent two-count throws open the lid and takes aim at an empty casket. Jack closes it.

To his immediate left an alcove runs the length of the wall with a curtain. Coming past it to the door, Jack suddenly steps back and levels his gun.

Someone is behind that curtain. The tips of his shoes poking out underneath.

"Doc?"

No reply.

But there's definitely a man in black shoes standing there.

Jack steps closer.

Takes hold of the curtain.

Whisks it open to reveal mannequins.

Jack almost puts a bullet in one.

Curses under his breath.

Suddenly hears something.

Very faint.

Coming from behind him.

Down the white-tiled hall he just exited...

Is someone crying?

Jack cocks the hammer of his gun.

Follows that noise down the hall to a closed door.

Opens it.


	9. Chapter 9

9

The morgue.

No sign of Billis.

Just sheet-covered bodies on autopsy tables.

The weeping has stopped.

Jack enters.

Autopsy scales hang beside the bodies.

Closets and refrigerated shelves along the walls.

Jack yanks open a closet door, gun trained, expecting to find Billis.

Nothing but medical supplies.

A faint whimper turns his head.

He stares at the bodies "Doc? If that's you, say something!"

No reply.

Gun in hand, he steps closer to the bodies.

Peels back the covers one by one to check them against their tags:

RHYS WILLIAMS.

THE DECOMPOSING PILOT.

RHIA'S CHARRED CORPSE.

HER SON'S.

Jack stares at the last body.

We can see the outline of a face. The sheet expands and contracts at the nostrils.

Slightly.

As if from breath.

"Billis?"

No answer.

Gun leveled, Jack takes the edge of the sheet, whisks it back to find the pastor.

Weeping through sutured eyelids.

The sutures on one eye have loosened; a ghastly eye peers out through the slit.

His nostrils and lips are sewn shut, arms and legs bound to the table with gauze.

"What - ?!"

The Pastor goes into violent spasms. Jack grabs a pair of surgical scissors from a tray and, pinning the writhing body with one hand, cuts the sutures sealing the mouth.

The Pastor's lips come apart like a deep fleshy wound, his convulsions subsiding only because death is imminent. In his last tortured breath "Behind... you..."

What? Jack turns.

WHIRRRR!

THE blade of a bone saw coming right at his face.

Billis swinging it at arm's length with psychotic calm.

Jack goes down and Billis pounces, driving the blade at his throat.

Jack catches Billis's wrists, barely keeping the saw at bay, forces the spinning blade against the leg of the autopsy table. It cuts into the steel.

Billis counters. Finding his knees, he brings the saw above his head for a final plunge. But Jack catches him with a thrusting kick to the gut. Sends Billis crashing into the storage cabinets.

As he jumps up for more –

BANG! –

Jack shoots him. Billis falls in a heap. But in death he has launched perhaps his most lethal attack, dropping the saw.

Locked in the 'on' position, it runs across the floor towards Jack, propelled by the spinning blade. Jack scrambles backwards on his haunches, but can't outrun it. Just as it's about to hit him in the face

A BOOT

stomps on the saw's cord, leashing it like a wild dog. The deadly instrument hops and skips around at the end of its tether, inches from Jack's face.

Until

Andy, owner of the boot, yanks the plug from the wall. He comes over, helps Jack to his feet. And only then sees the Pastor's sad fate.

"Christ almighty."

.

.

.

.

Emergency town meeting.

Worried locals abound.

Jack and Ianto trying to manage everyone's fear and anger.

"What are we supposed to drink while the water's turned off?" one woman demands.

"The A & P has plenty of bottled. Bruce has agreed to sell it at cost till we work out another source. Thanks again, Bruce." Jack says calmly.

The A & P Manager nods.

"And it just so happens while all this is going on none of the phones are working?"

"I know, Nathan. Andy's on his way to Wichy right now, see if we can get some answers." Jack promises.

"Where the hell's Mayor Hartman?" a random voice calls out.

"Hightailin' it to Kentucky." Another laughs.

"What - ?" Jack waves for silence.

"Saw her on the way out of town. Bitch practically ran me over."

The kid's mom swats him for taking like that.

Jack and Ianto exchanging a look about Hartman.

De facto town leaders.

"So whoever drank it's gonna go the way of Rhys and Johnnyl? I drank it. My wife drank it. My kids."

"We don't know that it's going to affect everybody the same, everybody's body reacts a little diff –" Ianto's speech is cut off.

Strange laughter cuts him off.

A woman in the back. Horn-rimmed glasses. Ten-dollar wig. Going red in the face she's laughing so hard. It's creepy, she can't stop. Everybody just stares as this demented old lady laughs and laughs.

.

.

.

.

A sheriff department hover speeds down the fog-cloaked highway toward Wichy.

Andy is humming along at eighty miles an hour.

Checks his radio.

STATIC.

Turns it off.

Suddenly,

DEAFENING POPS AS –

\- THE BLADDER BLOWS OUT!

A spike strip lying across the road. The hover fishtails out of control, wobbling violently on its rims, threatening to roll and Andy struggles, teeth-clenched, not to let it.

"Shit!" he roars as the ruptured bladder fly off. The pickup careens off the shoulder and slams to a stop in an irrigation ditch.

Davidson has barely righted himself when he's pulled from the truck by a dozen soldiers on bio-hazard suits.

Thrown against the hood, L-16s in his face, Davidson's astonishment is almost comical.

"Whoa."


	10. Chapter 10

10

Meanwhile Jack and Ianto.

Tense words in the kitchen.

"Maybe you should go stay with your parents for a while." Jack snarls, "Micha needs you now."

"Maybe you should go stay with my parents."

"Look, this isn't …" Jack sighs theatrically.

"No, Jack, you're not the only one with responsibilities here, half these people are my …" Sees something out the kitchen window.

It scares him.

"What? What was it?" Jack moves to his side.

"Shadow."

Jack grabs his gun and goes out.

Jack stands at the edge of the property, eyeing the back field. It's eerily still.

"Somebody there?!" he calls out.

Silence.

Turning, he sees the light is on inside the shed.

He walks over, pushes open the door with the gun muzzle.

As he peeks warily inside tools fall to the floor. Scares the hell of out him. Jack switches off the light and then hears glass shatter inside the house.

"Who are you?!" Ianto is screaming "Who are you?! JACK!"

He crosses the yard at a sprint, kicks open the screen door And sees three soldiers in boi-suits forcibly escorting Ianto to the front door.

Jack lunges into the fray, gun outstretched. "What the fuck! Get off him!"

His heroics are short-lived. Grabbed, spun, put in a chokehold, he is disarmed and dragged out the door by the suited intruders. It's over in two seconds flat - chilling, the ease with which he is subdued.

They wrestle Ianto aboard an idling school bus. Jack behind him, still resisting, choked blue in the face.

"Where are you taking us?!" Ianto asks, shaking.

.

.

.

.

Hurtling along under armed guard, Jack and Ianto see shocking images out the windows.

FAMILIES BEING PULLED FROM EVERY HOUSE IN SIGHT.

The entire town is being corralled onto buses like pigs off to slaughter.

All the people stand in lines under the lights. Stunned. No one saw this coming. Raised ten feet and topped with razor wire, the fence is patrolled by armed guards in hazmat suits.

A recorded message plays over the field's tinny P.A. system:

" _ **...Please remain calm and do not interfere with the work of the examiners. Information will be provided to you as it becomes available. Thank you for your cooperation..."**_

Repeating as medical personnel come down the lines with digital ear thermometers checking temperatures.

A single BEEP means you're okay.

A quick triple BEEP-BEEP-BEEP means you're not and prompts a swift response, which we see playing out across the field:

Burly MEDTECHS loading the unlucky person into one of the many golf carts on the scene - pulling wives away from husbands, husbands away from wives, children from parents, parents from children - a coldly scientific process that ends with the golf carts speeding the outtakes up the hill to the high school while loved ones scream in vain for their return.

Here are Jack and Ianto, as stunned and disoriented as everyone else. Jack confronts a passing examiner, his outrage reflected back at him in the mirrored face shield.

"What did we get exposed to?! What was it?!" Jack demands.

The examiner walks past without reply. Ianto meanwhile appraises the medical teams, the work being done.

"Elevated temperature usually means infection, but a toxin can do the same thing... I don't know, the way Gwen was acting makes me think it's chemical." Ianto says softly.

" So they round us up with assault rifles, what's that?" Jack snarls, still bristling.

" Medical response teams train with case studies, they know the symptomology, pharmacological outcomes –"

"In plain-speak." Jack asks.

" They're as scared as we are." Ianto hisses.

Ianto steps away to help an elderly woman who is leaning against the fence. Soldiers escort Mayor Hartman and her assistant onto the field.

" Governor Hatfield's a personal friend of mine!" Yvonne is screaming.

Nobody cares. They get dumped in a line near Jack. Hartman draws hostile stares. Word of her hasty exodus has apparently gotten around.

"Hey 'Vonnie, how's Kentucky?" Jack barks.

"Bastards spiked our hovers, pulled us out at gunpoint." She returned.

"Wow, sounds like your civil rights might have been violated, you should look into that." Jack says with wide eyes and Hartman frowns at the sarcasm, taking in the angry stares.

"Is that what everybody's so ticked off at me for?"

"You ran. Town needed a leader." Jack shot back.

"You be the leader." She sighs, "It's not our town anymore."

Jack steps to the fence, watches the guards prowling the perimeter.

Otherworldly riflemen with biohazard hoods and leashed dogs. His gaze finds the old scoreboard behind the backstop. Lingers on it. Something poignant about it there behind the barbed wire.

But what he sees past it is chilling.

Two figures standing in the tungsten glow of a flood light, staring at him...

JACOB AND KEIREN WILLIAMS

Rhys's sons. Delirious with rage and vengeance.

Teeth and gums exposed by some obscene tightening of the jaw muscles.

Noise on the PA system makes Jack jump. He looks back and the Williams boys are gone. Haunted, he scans the dark woods. And suddenly a hand grabs his shoulder. He spins, ready for a fight. It's his deputy.

"Funny thing happened on the way to Wichy." Andy drawled.

Gallows humor.

Followed by a deadly serious, "Who are these fuckers?"

"Same ones who don't know anything about a dead pilot and aren't missing a plane."

Jack surveys the crowd, sensing beneath the fear and bewilderment a growing rage. It's palpable, a chemical shift in their psychology.

"This don't end well." Andy said under his breath.

Jack shakes his head - nope. An examiner comes down the line checking temperatures.

Jack engages. "I need to talk to somebody right now! Hey, do you hear me?!"

The examiner jams a thermometer in Jack's ear.

Pushes the button.

BEEP.

Moves on to Ianto, who is preoccupied with patient care.

"This woman is asthmatic, she needs her medica –"

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!

Time stands still.

Ianto in disbelief.

Jack spins to fend off the onrushing med-techs.


	11. Chapter 11

11

"Get away from him! He's not sick, he's pregnant!"

They grab Ianto.

Jack fights, but is hopelessly outnumbered.

Andy tries to help and is quickly subdued.

They drag Ianto away screaming. "JACK! DON'T LET THEM TAKE ME!"

"LEAVE HIM ALONE!"

You've never seen a man fight like Jack Harkness fights for his mate. Zapped with a Tazer gun, kicked, knocked to the ground by a rifle butt, kicked once more. Again and again he tries to rise, again and again he is beaten down, until his body no longer answers to his will.

Lying in the grass, he lifts his gaze just enough to see Ianto being taken up the hill to the high school. By sheer stubbornness, he climbs to his feet once more.

Takes a couple of wobbly steps.

A gun butt cracks him in the back of the head.

He goes down and stays there this time.

Face down in the dirt by second base.

Expelling one last breath of resistance, his name along with it "Ianto..."

And then, mercifully, he blacks out.

.

.

.

.

Ceiling lights whipping by above as a masked examiner wheels Ianto down the corridor.

He's strapped to a gurney.

The passing classrooms offer flashes of nightmare imagery, scattered desks, crayons on the floor. Stains he hadn't seen before.

Suddenly, right in front of them a screaming face shatters the window of a classroom door, spraying the corridor with shards that crunch as the gurney rolls over them.

A bio-suited guard beats the screaming man back with a baton.

Turning the corner, the gymnasium is spanned by rows of sterile-white cots that have not been touched. Unopened boxes of supplies on pallets. Equipment wrapped in plastic. A medical contingency plan abandoned in its early stages.

As Ianto is pushed into a maintenance elevator, an examiner leans over him with an anesthesia mask.

He tries to resist but his arms are strapped and the mask fitted so quickly to his face that his scream of protest fogs the plastic.

.

.

.

Jack awakens in darkness.

Lifts his head, disoriented.

He's lying in what appears to be a livestock trailer.

Ianto.

The thought sends him scrambling to the back door. He rams it with his shoulder.

Pounds it with his fists. Kicks it with his boot. His fists again. And as he continues this futile effort to force it open a figure emerges from the shadows behind him.

Creeping closer. A man. Sinister face catching the light. Jack, still hammering the door, doesn't see him coming.

The figure stops right behind Jack and we see the grim visage was a trick of the shadows. It's his friend, the concessions vendor from the ball game.

"Jack..."

Jack spins, wild-eyed, caught in a moment of madness. "Kevin! I gotta get outta here!"

Continues his furious pounding.

"JACK!"

" WHAT?!" Jack roars into his face.

"You're scaring us." Kevin says softly and Jack sees them now. At the far end, terrified by his erratic behavior. Men, women, children. Faces we recognize from the ball game, the high school, the town meeting.

Jack calms himself, explaining "They took Ianto."

" They took Linda." Kevin sighs indicating other unmatched spouses, "And they took George and Francine and Whit and Simon and a whole mess of other people. Breaking your hand on that door's still a dumb idea."

Jack takes his point.

Follows Kevin back to the group.

The townspeople sit huddled together like Third World refugees. A mechanic in a John Deere ball cap engages Jack. Frazzled nerves fuel the exchange. "Can't you do something? I mean, Christ"

"What do you want me to do, Ed?" Jack sobs.

"Something! You're the sheriff for God's sake!"

Edward simmers down. Feels no real rancor toward Jack. Just can't handle the situation.

"Anybody heard what it is yet? What they spilled?" Jack asks the others.

Nobody has.

Whatever it was, they're keeping us here till it's cleaned up. Whole town's sealed off. Roadblocks, everything. Tim Mitchell tried to run one of 'em, they shot him dead." The town planner speaks.

It's the guy who gave Jack the pipeline schematic, here with his ten-year-old son. Other children are in tears. Some of the parents as well. A distraught mother breaks down at the sight of Jack.

"Amy's out there... my Amy..." she sobs and he embraces her, not knowing what to say.

A tall open-faced guy steps forward, local choir director clinging to his faith. "I know things look bad right now, I know they do, but like they say in every tragedy there's a blessing –"

"What's our blessing, Sheldon? I'm dying to hear this one." Someone snarls.

"We're not sick yet. Which means we still got a chance."

A blessing indeed.

Suddenly, the squeal of brakes. The truck slowing.

A look of panic sweeps the group. Jack rips a metal brace from the wall. A weapon.

The truck stops.

Parents shield their kids as the door is unlocked. It swings open.

Jack comes at them, ready to attack when he sees they are rescue workers, "Quickly, people. We're getting you out of here."

Jack and the others step warily from the truck, take in their surroundings.

A hover-truck stop being used as an operations staging area.

Military trucks refueling.

Transport helicopters coming and going from the adjoining field.

Supplies and troops being shuttled to and fro.

In the fenced-in lot where the livestock truck is, a few hundred survivors await evacuation, getting treatment in first aid tents.

"As you board the buses you will each be given a dispensation card, it looks like this, do not lose it, you will not be allowed into the safe zone without your dispensation card..." a voice is calling out over a loud speaker.

Bracelets are being snapped on wrists and hurriedly scanned into handheld computers. Temperatures taken one last time. Visible relief on people's faces as they look toward the buses idling nearby.

As Jack and the others take their place in line, a small miracle. The distraught mom spots her little girl. Bursts into tears "AMY!"

Hugs her, frantically relieved. The reunion only heightens Jack's loss. As he surveys the truck stop, plotting his escape:

"Don't." Kevin growls.

"What?"

"Whatever you're thinking. There's one way out of here and it's on those buses. You got a seat on one. A seat a lot of people wish they had. "

"Let 'em have it." Jack whispers, still looking furtively around.

" Jack. This might your last chance. Don't lose it running off on some fool's errand."

"Ianto's a fool's errand?" Jack swings to face him.

"You know what I'm saying."

"Tell you what, Kev. You don't ask me why I can't leave without my mate and I won't ask you why you can." A bit harsh but right on the money. Kevin is left to nurse his guilty conscience as Jack sees a gap and takes off.


	12. Chapter 12

12

We run with him down the narrow passage between two big rigs.

Quick stop.

Two armed guards on patrol.

Jack ducks under the trailers, hiding until they're gone.

Moves on.

Squeezing through some temporary fencing, he jumps in the back of a truck headed back into town.

.

.

.

.

Sedated people are strapped to gurneys in a social studies classroom. Among them we find Ianto, semi-conscious, shoved in here amid the overturned desks.

An examiner works from a field kit, not providing medical care, taking tissue and blood samples.

Gunfire erupts outside. The examiner stops his work and stares out the window. He doesn't move. Something terrible is happening out there.

Craning his neck, Ianto can see the ball field where pandemonium has broken out. Crazed people attack examiners, murdering med-techs. They overwhelm the guards, shoot them with their own weapons, pull down the fence at center field, causing a stampede.

The perimeter soldiers converge and open fire, but they can't stop the escape.

Seen through the haze of sedation, the horror is dreamlike. Ianto's eyes flutter closed. Helpless on his gurney.

Yesterday's homework assignment chalked on the blackboard above him.

.

.

.

.

Sitting among stacks of crates, Jack watches the moonlit prairie go by. Like a practical joke, an old road sign goes past: "Welcome to Marsh County. Friendliest Place on Boeshane."

Jack looks at the boxes, curious what's inside. He opens one. Wishes he hadn't.

BODY BAGS.

.

.

.

Pot of coffee on the coffeemaker at the sheriff's office has boiled itself dry. The door creaks open. Jack, crouched like a thief, hurries to his desk, grabs his spare revolver, some bullets.

A shotgun from the gun rack. Shells.

Loading up, he catches sight of something horrific. Drops a box of shells. On the floor of the holding cell Johnny is dead. His back arched high off the floor. Neck tendons, obscenely tight, practically tearing the jaw from his face.

Jack steps back, right onto the barrel of a shotgun aimed at his head.

"Easy."

Jack raises his arms, turns. "Andy?"

"Chief?!"

"Stop surprising me like that." Jack huffs, caught again.

Manly embrace.

Jack goes to look at Johnny again

"Don't look at that." Andy swallows, showing he already has.

"They let you guys out?" Jack asks.

"Let us? People went nuts. Tore the place apart. It was like a human slaughterhouse. I just ran." Andy snorts then the sound of a passing vehicle interrupts them.

They duck the flash of its headlights. It's that same black hover going at ninety miles an hour.

"Ianto, man, I tried to stop 'em." Andy whispers.

Jack nods, gathering shells from the floor.

Stands, man on a mission. "I'm going to get him."

Davidson double pumps the shotgun, the stress of the situation bringing out his redneck roots. "Hoo-fuckin'-yah, chief, let's go to the high school."

.

.

.

.

Screams fill the school.

Violent chaos spilling from the classrooms.

An Examiner runs down a second-floor corridor past a half-dressed Crazy roaming the halls in a head bandage. "Let's go! Forget it, we're leaving! We are leaving!"

They scramble for the exits.

The one drawing blood samples hears the evacuation order. Grabs his things and runs out, accidentally leaving a needle embedded in the last victim's arm. Blood drips onto the floor.

PLIP. PLIP. PLIP.

We move up the arm to the face...

It's IANTO.

He stares at the dripping blood. Hands strapped, he can't do anything to stop it.

They jump in helicopters and into trucks. It's obvious what's happening. The military is pulling out, conceding town center to the lunatics.

Jack and Andy, avoiding the main streets, cut through a series of backyards in a dark residential neighborhood. The night reverberates with the faint sound of gunfire. They hop a fence and Jack grabs Andy, pulls him sharply back.

A woman sits at a picnic table in a bathrobe gutting a turkey. Creepy uncomprehending stare. Her husband noosed from a tree behind her.

"Did Peter call?" she asks the turkey repeatedly.

Madness.

They move on, hop the other fence.

The housewife screaming after them "DID PETER CALL?!"

As they distance themselves, a look of dread comes to Andy's face. "That's gonna be me."

"You don't know that." Jack pants as they skim along the fencing.

"Right out of my goddamn tree like my Uncle Willard who swears on the Bible he ate a tadpole and shat out a bullfrog, and that's without the screwy water so –"

Andy, we got enough problems without you inventing 'em."

"Easy for you to say, you're at the end of the pipeline. I'm half a mile from the Davies." Andy is whining now.

"Who's the sheriff?"

"What?" Andy asks with confusion.

"Who's the sheriff of Marsh County?"

"You."

"I am. Who's the deputy?"

"Me."

"You are. Deputy does what the sheriff tells him, that's the balance of power. Now I'm telling you you're not getting sick, understand?" Jack explained and Andy nods, appreciating the sentiment.

"Hope you're right, chief. I'm no world beater but I had plans."

Crossing a street, they see military drones, perhaps a mile away, lifting off into the night sky. Jack, alarmed, quickens his stride.

"That's the school! They're bailing! Come on!" Jack growls.


	13. Chapter 13

13

PLIP. PLIP. PLIP.

Ianto watching himself bleed.

He could die like this.

One drip at a time.

Gritting his teeth, flexing his forearm, he manages to painfully scrape the needle from his arm on the side of the gurney.

In the aftermath of the military exodus there is an eerie calm filled with noises of the abandoned inmates.

With those horrible sounds in his ears Ianto scans the classroom.

His fellow townspeople.

Varying degrees of madness on display:

A middle-aged woman giggling to herself.

A teenage boy talking incoherently.

A man with the same half dead, half twitching face Johnny had.

Others are unconscious, comatose, drooling.

Ianto locks eyes, unexpectedly, with a high school girl strapped down on the other side of the room. Terrified, trembling, but otherwise asymptomatic. Carys. His office helper and junior nurse.

"Carys?! Carys, honey, are you hurt...?!"

Carys, deep in shock, trembling in terror "Is this... really happening...?"

Ianto puts on a brave face, doctor instincts taking over. "Don't worry, it'll be okay. All right?"

" You don't really believe that, do you?"

Carys calls his bluff and suddenly it's Ianto battling emotions. Near tears, he shakes his head no.

"Where's your mom and dad?"

"We were hiding... we tried to get away..." The sentence ends in sobs. Her parents are dead. Ianto tugs at his restraints, wants to get over there to help but can't. And now they have bigger problems.

A terrible sound draws their gazes to the door.

Somebody's coming. You can hear their shuffling steps.

Ianto shoots Carys a look.

"Be very quiet." he whispers.

Carys stifles her sobs as the creepy scraping noise comes closer...

And now it stops. The classroom door swings open with a groan. A figure silhouetted in the doorway. Image from a nightmare: A pot-bellied Crazy drenched in blood. The A & P Manager. He is dragging a pitchfork.

Ianto and Carys watch in mute terror, praying he'll leave. Instead he enters. Drags the pitchfork to the nearest gurney and looks down at the insane snickering woman.

He mumbles something nonsensical then raises the pitchfork and spears her in the chest.

Carys screams.

Bruce extracts the pitchfork from his first victim and shuffles to his second.

The babbling boy.

Gets him and continues his murderous ritual, heading straight for Carys who is thrashing wildly but will never escape.

Ianto fights to free his hands, to save Carys.

He can't.

Stabbing everyone in his path, Bruce arrives at Carys who closes her eyes as the lunatic raises his pitchfork.

Just then, Ianto from the other side of the room "NOOOO!"

The kind of scream even a lunatic can't ignore. He stops, turns.

Sees Ianto over there, strapped down by the blackboard, helpless. Nudging desks aside, he comes for him instead.

Hands pinned at his side, Ianto stretches his fingertips just far enough to reach the blackboard chalk tray and, using it as a rail, gets the gurney rolling. Rolls himself right out the classroom door, gripping whatever's within reach.

Bruce follows him out, dragging the pitchfork.

Ianto rolls down the row of lockers, grabbing the padlocks with that strapped hand, pulling himself along.

The pitchfork drags right behind him.

Blind panic setting in.

His diversion quickly shaping up as suicide.

Craning his neck he can see Bruce coming.

Quickens his pace, fingers grabbing frantically at the padlocks.

And then tragedy strikes.

He misses the next lock, the last one in this row, and as a result he misses the turn. And drifts helplessly into the center of the corridor...

The wheels of the gurney come to a stop.

The dragging closer. And now he shuffles into view. Stands above Ianto, leering.

As he raises the pitchfork a shotgun blast catches him in the arm, spinning him fully around as a second blast rips a hole in his chest.

Bruce falls in a heap, never comprehending his death. Jack and Andy run to Ianto, Andy standing guard as Jack un-straps him.

"You okay?" Jack asks.

"Not really." Unstrapped, he takes off down the hall.

"Where are you going?!" Jack yells as he follows.

Ianto un-straps Carys. Carys cries in his arms. Ianto holds her as he might his own child.

Crazies wander the streets, maimed, bleeding, faces half dead. They attack each other at random, some unleashing the same murderous fury on inanimate objects. Non-predatory types stagger through the night babbling.

Crazed children running around like orphans of the apocalypse.

.

.

.

.

Jack, Ianto, Andy and Carys jog along Main Street, past shattered shop fronts and parked cars that have been booted to prevent driving.

"Nobody's driving outta here" Andy states.

An airship flies by overhead. Fast. Loud. Jack and the others duck around the corner by the bank. Looks of terror on their faces, knowing they're the targets.

They run on. Up ahead, a young mother sits breast-feeding her baby on the curb. She's sobbing, rocking.

Ianto slows.

Jack keeps him moving.

"It's Molly Hutchins." Ianto says, trying to struggle out of Jack's grip on his arm.

"You can't help her." Jack whispers and Ianto can now see the baby in the young mother's arms is not a baby.

It's plastic doll.

Ianto stumbles and Jack pulls him to his side, hurrying him away.

.

.

.

.

They cross a wide field singing with cicadas. A mile from town center it's almost peaceful.

The occasional burst of gunfire in the distance.

"That truck stop where fifty hits the county line, they're taking people out of there, putting them on buses." Jack whispers as Ianto grips his hand tightly.

"Where to?" Andy asks as he checks his weapon nervously.

"Wichy maybe, wherever, some safe zone." Jack shrugs.

"Hell of a walk, county line." Andy snorts, then checks behind them.

"My cruiser's back at the house." Jack suggests, "Worst case scenario, my Dad's old explorer is in the barn. I was re-painting it for him over summer."

"We'll be sitting ducks on the highway." Andy considers, "But going off world is a bit of a stretch."

"I'm thinking the power line road. Its crap, but we can drive it." Jack finally agrees.

Andy looks at Ianto and can see that he's waning, "Leaves us about a mile on foot."

"Exactly."


	14. Chapter 14

14

Ianto falls behind, stops in the middle of the field. The others look back at him, then to Jack - what's going on?

Jack walks back to him. He stands, arms folded, trying to hide his fear.

" What if they're right? What if I'm sick?" Ianto asks, then gestures at Carys "What if we both are?"

"You're not sick." Jack says forcefully.

"Saying it doesn't make it true."

"If you're sick, I'm sick - we drank from the same tap - and I'm not sick. Not yet anyway. So let's keep walking." Jack reasons, holding out his hand.

After a few beats Ianto takes in and they head back to the others, Ianto with lingering reluctance, the issue not entirely settled in his mind.

.

.

.

The shallow river fed from the bog is their main obstacle now.

Wide, flat, glimmering with the same toxic sheen as the bog.

Jack and the others step carefully from stone to stone.

"See those folks in town?" Andy is whispering to Jack "Man oh man, makes you wonder, don't it? 'Bout human nature?"

"It's not human nature's doing this, it's a chemical."

"Actin' on an instinct that's already there or they'd be group huggin' instead of tearing each other apart." Andy explains. Then ahead of them Carys slips on a mossy rock and falls into the river.

"Shit! Get her out of there!" Jack cries as Ianto swings to see what happened.

They pull her out and tend to her on the opposite bank. Carys sits sobbing in the aftermath, scared to death, soaked from head to toe.

"It's okay, we'll get you some dry clothes at the house." Jack promises.

Ianto shares a private look of concern with Jack, both noticing the creek's toxic sheen.

Carys sees it, too, and draws her own conclusion. "I'm... gonna... die..."

Andy takes off his deputy coat and puts it over Carys for warmth. Squats in front of her, sheriff-in-the-making.

Typical big brother.

"You're getting out of here. Mum and Dad made that my duty." He says forcefully and she snuffles as he hugs her.

.

.

.

The foursome moves in wary tandem, skirting the perimeter of an old farm. A barn. Three silos. Ianto walks beside Carys, who is cold, shivering, and generally miserable, but manages to strike a lighter note:

"Guess this means no prom, huh?" Cays jokes nervously and Ianto half smiles, nods yeah.

"Not all it's cracked up to be" he whispers to her, "My dress suit cost over 300 drerlls and Jack threw up all over it."

She giggles nervously at his face of doom.

"The smell! I gave it a sacrificial burning"

Jack's hand flies up, halting the group. He gestures 'stay' then walks on alone a bit farther.

Listens.

Comes rushing back.

"Down down down!" he hisses and they all hit the ground.

Hearts pounding.

Listening.

Jack and Andy draw their guns. Jack indicates the hillcrest.

And now the enemy comes into view, moon shadowed and lethal a platoon of soldiers are wading through the tall grass in infrared goggles and bio-suits. One of them is carrying a flamethrower.

"Oh man." Andy whines

"In there." Jack motions to three building behind them. They crawl through the grass.

There is a storm bunker with a small door hidden in the long grass and Jack motions them to it knowing that if it can withstand a solar storm it can withstand fire.

Closing the hatch they watch through viewer as the soldiers storm the farmhouse.

We hear a shriek inside the house and moments later the soldiers emerge, dragging a woman off the porch into the front yard.

They stand her up.

Somebody jams a digital thermometer in her ear.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.

BANG!

They shoot her.

Point blank.

A battlefield execution.

The guy with the flamethrower steps up and torches the body.

Jack's anger overwhelms his judgment. He reaches for the hatch. Andy grabs his arm "no, chief."

Flushed with rage, Jack tries to pull away, but Andy holds strong. Ianto whimpers with fear and Jack's good senses returns. He backs down. But they're doomed anyway.

A soldier is walking their way.

He checks the first then the second building, working his way toward the last one, coming to the bunker they're hiding in. Panic sweeps the group. Jack searches for some miracle escape. Up. Down. Left. Right. There is nothing.

The only exit is the hatch and the soldier is creeping toward it with his assault rifle.

Andy is readying his weapons.

Jack his.

Ianto in disbelief.

Carys whimpering with fright.

"Shut her up!" Jack whispers and Ianto clamps his hand over Carys's mouth as the hatch is forced.

The muzzle of a Lazer-16 enters first. Then the soldier's masked face. To the right he sees nothing, to the left Andy who smacks him in the head with his rifle butt, knocking him down.

He and Jack drag the semi-conscious soldier into the silo and close the hatch.

"Pray they don't do a headcount." Jack says softly as Andy restrains the soldier.

They wait on pins and needles to see if the missing soldier will be noticed. The platoon regroups in front of the house and move on.

Gasps of relief.

Ianto uncovers Carys's mouth.

Carys doubles over crying.

Andy yanks off the soldier's helmet, ready to crush his skull with the rifle butt. But the face behind the mask is not the face of an enemy...

It's a young boy.

Scared as hell. Far from home.

"Aw Jesus..."


	15. Chapter 15

15

The young private sits against the silo wall, welt on his forehead where Andy smacked him.

Blue-collar kid from a blue-collar state. Well-mannered. West Virginian sector drawl.

He's scared. They are the enemy.

"What's your name?" Jack demands.

"Stephen... "

Jack gestures to the yard outside, to the execution they just witnessed - a silent seething 'why'?

"Orders, sir."

"From who?!" Jack demands.

"Whoever gives 'em, I dunno." Stephen whines, "Are y'all gonna shoot me?"

Ianto answers for Jack and Andy. "No."

"Then can you have him stop pointin' that thing?" Stephen nods at Andy's shotgun aimed at his head.

Jack gives Andy a look and Andy lowers it.

"Stephen, I want you to tell me what exactly the fuck is going on down here." Jack squats so he appears less threatening as Ianto rubs his stomach in the background.

" I dunno. All's they said was there'd been some accident. My whole unit got flown in. We didn't even know what planet we was on till we saw the license plates."

"There wasn't anything on the news? Before you left?" Ianto prompts.

"No, sir. From what I hear they're doing one of them media blackouts." Stephen is squirming now.

Jack and Ianto exchange a look.

"Am I gonna die breathing without my mask?"

"Is that what they said?" Ianto kneels and reaches for his head. Doctor mode kicking in.

"They just said keep it on."

Ianto tosses him his gasmask. He straps it on over his face, breathes and talks through it the rest of the conversation.

"Nobody's said anything about what it was they spilled?" Jack is leaning back in his heels as he considers, giving Ianto room to pluck at the boy's head.

" No, sir, but - I'm probably not supposed to talk about this, but my sergeant, he saw this computer program they ran over at central, some kinda 'casualty projection' I think he called it, you know, to see how things were gonna turn out down here."

"How'd it go?" Ianto whispers softly.

"Nobody lived past the third day."

"Nobody?" Ianto has stalled out, looking him in the eye.

"Crazies killed most of 'em, sickness got the rest. Today's the second day, I'd get out of here tonight if I was you." The boy suggests.

"How?" Jack asks, reaching out to calm his mate "The truck stop?"

"Dunno, sir. Perimeter's pretty hardcore. Even for healthies, they're giving 'em one warning shot then it's a kill order. " Stephen talks calmly, then hesitates, " Look, um, I know I don't deserve no favors from you people, but if you let me go I swear to God I won't come back, they can court-martial me, I don't care, I didn't sign up to shoot unarmed civilians. I'll just leave. Okay...?"

Testing the waters, he starts to stand up. Andy levels his gun.

"Sit down." Andy snarls.

"Cool it, Andy." Jack says softly, still looking at his mate.

"He'll give away our location."

"We're not staying here." Jack rises and holds out his hand for Ianto, who accepts it and is drawn up, onto a hug.

Jack nods 'go ahead' to the boy. He stands up.

" Reckon you're keeping that, huh?" Stephen says as he watches Andy gathering the Laer-16.

"Yeah, we're gonna hold onto those, Stephen." Jack agrees with a disarming smile.

Stephen nods okay. Steps to the hatch. Pauses there. "Sorry 'bout your folks's town."

Then exits, running off into the night, opposite direction of his platoon.

Jack grabs the Lazer-16.

As they come out the hatch Andy wonders. "Why aren't they telling anybody what's going on down here?"

Jack pauses, Andy's question hanging.

"That's why." Jack points to the burning body. They just stare, the firelight playing across their haunted faces.

"Let's get to the house." Jack says as he strides off.

They set off and we see the farmhouse from a distance. Alone on the prairie. A plume of smoke rising up ghostly pale in the moonlight.

They come up through the back acres. Jack with the lazer-16 on his shoulder. Ianto offering a grave assessment.

"This wasn't a chemical spill." Ianto whispers to Jack, trying to be sure Carys can't hear, "They're burning the bodies. It must be bacteriological, viral. Something that spreads by human contact. Or the air."

"The air? - it was in the water." Carys says and Ianto sighs as he turns and gives a grim nod.

"It was. It must have more than one mode of transmission. Or mutated or something, who knows." He tries to explain.

"How come I'm not crazy yet?" Andy frowns.

"I told you why." Jack snarls.

Andy turns to Ianto, disregarding his boss, "Besides the fact that your husband officially forbade it."

"Expose a group of people to something, there's always handfuls who aren't affected. I don't know, Andy, maybe you're naturally immune." Ianto suggests.

Nah, I'm not that lucky." Andy snorts.

They walk on.

Ianto's face darkens as their house comes into view at the top of the field.

Curtains sway in shattered windows. The cruiser, gutted by fire, smolders in the driveway. Caught up in his emotions, he dashes toward the house with Jack, Andy and Carys playing catch up.

"Ianto, wait!"

Ianto runs in the front door and slows, shocked

THE HOUSE IS DESTROYED.

Holes smashed through the walls.

Sofas and chairs slashed open.

The upright piano decimated.

Jack enters and surveys the destruction with Ianto as Andy checks the other rooms to make sure there's nobody here.

Ianto turns and walks out, past Carys who has stopped at the front door out of simple respect. Jack lingers a moment then follows.

Ianto at the clothesline taking down the laundry. Jack walks over.

"What are you doing?" Jack asks and gets no reply "Stop."

He catches his hands. Ianto breaks down, dropping clothes. Jack holds him beside the fluttering white sheets.

"None of this matters. You know that." Jack soothes.

Ianto is crying as he sobs, "I don't care about the house... it's everything. Everybody. Everybody we know... I don't see how we recover from this... I don't see how this town ever comes back..."

Neither does Jack. He holds him close.


	16. Chapter 16

16

Through a downstairs window, we see Jack and Ianto outside by the clothesline

Someone, inside the house, is watching.

Ianto walks away from the house to clear his head. Carys following, hoping to console. Jack comes up the steps past Andy who sits at the top, wiping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.

Andy nods at the smoldering cruiser. "mobile's seen better days."

"We'll have to take our chances on the highway. Power lines will take too long." Jack agrees and tosses Andy the L-16. "Stay with them, I'll be right back."

Andy nods and goes off across the lawn to catch the others.

Jack enters the kitchen.

Overturned appliances.

Food spilled on the floor.

Jack grabs some bottled water and tosses it in a duffle bag.

With a bowling motion he slides the duffle bag the length of the hall to the front door as he heads upstairs.

Cresting the stairs, Jack comes down the hall to the bedroom.

He stops in the doorway, shocked. It's a bloodbath.

A sheet covers two corpses on the bed. Who's under there? Jack steps closer, draws back the sheet

TWO SLAUGHTERED PIGS

Their severed heads on the pillows suggest a husband and wife. Jack places his hand on a carcass, checking for warmth. His face darkens. Fresh kills. He tenses at a sudden scary thought.

IS THERE SOMEONE UNDER THE BED?

He backs slowly away, angling his gaze underneath.

BARE FLOOR.

A moment of relief and then with renewed dread he slowly turns to face the doorway, realizing the killers are more likely behind him, hiding in the house, perhaps somewhere down this dark upstairs hallway.

Jack steps into the hall. Tense breath and then he starts down it.

Very slowly.

Trying not to make a sound.

Sensitive to the slightest creaks of the floorboards.

Halfway to the stairs he stops, thinking he heard something.

Listens.

Nothing.

The house is eerily still. Silent except for the curtains billowing in the broken windows.

He continues on.

Heel to toe.

Heart pounding.

Each closed door a potential hiding place.

Ten feet in front of him on the left, that door looks particularly suspicious.

THE CLOSET

open a crack.

Jack's eyes are riveted to it as he approaches, convinced it will fly open any second. But the attack comes from an open door to his right, from the half painted nursery.

As he passes a bag is thrown over his head and he is hit - WHAM! - flat across the chest with a pipe.

The blow sends him flying backwards. Bag on his head, Jack is kicked in the gut and dragged into the master bedroom by his feet, the plastic sucking back into his mouth as he gasps for air.

He is thrown across the room into the bureau.

CRASH!

Ianto, walking away, looks back at the house.

The windblown grass drowning out noises.

"Did you hear that?" he asks with a frown.

Carys shakes her head. Andy too. They walk on.

Staggering to his feet, Jack claws at the plastic bag covering his face, ripping it away to finally see his attackers.

JACOB AND KEIREN WILLIAMS

Faces half paralyzed, half in spasm, wrenched into hideous lopsided sneers.

Jacob grabs the knife he used to slaughter the pigs and makes a lunging stab. Jack's hand flies up in a reflexive block.

In and out, a flash of steel.

Jack recoils clutching his hand, blood pouring down. Kieran swings a pipe at his head. Barely misses. Jack stumbles backwards onto the bed, sandwiched between the slaughtered pigs.

Jacob jumps astride him, drives the knife two-handed at Jack's chest. Jack catches him by the wrists, sends him tumbling off the side of the bed, and rolls off the other side as Kieran brings the pipe down like a sledgehammer at his face. The pipe hits the pillow instead.

Jack climbs to his feet, fumbling for something to fight with. Grabs the phone book. A poor choice. The Williams boys back him into the corner. Feathers swirling.

Kieran unleashes another swing of the pipe.

WHAM!

Jack partly blocks it with the Yellow Pages, but the force sends him flying backwards out the window.

CRASH!

Jack flies through and tumbles off the porch roof onto the lawn below.

Ianto, Carys and Andy whip around.

"JACK!" Ianto screams. They run for the house, but they're too far away to help.

Jack tries to crawl away, but there's no escape.

The Williams boys emerge from the house, closing in for the kill.

Andy, Ianto and Carys running as fast as they can.

"JACK!" Ianto's voice breaks as he surges forward.

They can't reach him before the Williams boys do.

Knowing this, Andy drops to one knee with his revolver and fires two quick shots from the neighbor's yard

POP!

POP!

Dead-centers around in each of the Williams boys' chests.

It slows them but doesn't stop them completely. Instantly up and running again, Andy puts another two rounds in each brother on the move - POP-POP! POP-POP! - dropping them in their tracks five feet from Jack.

Ianto runs to Jack's side, near hysterics. Badly shaken himself, he puts his arm around Ianto. Blood courses down Ianto's cheek from his hand.

"Jack oh my God let me see!" Ianto sobs hysterically, "LET ME SEE!"

He holds out his hand. Blood pooling in the upturned palm.

" Oh Jesus, Jack..." he flips it over, sees the exit wound. "...it went through?!"

He nods yeah, rattled to the core.

Carys runs to the clothesline, grabs a T-shirt.

Tears off a strip.

Ties the first loop around Jack wrist as a tourniquet and wraps the rest around his palm as a bandage. "Too tight?"

Jack shakes his head, it's fine.

Quick thinking by Carys.

Ianto clasps her hand - thanks.

This whole time Andy stands over the dead brothers

Staring down at them.

And then things get

WEIRD


	17. Chapter 17

17

Andy reloads and puts three more bullets in the head of each brother, slowly, deliberately, savoring each shot.

With dawning horror Jack and Ianto watch as he reloads a second time and continues –

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Ianto can't watch anymore. "STOP!"

Andy fires one last time and then, after a pause, walks over and pulls Jack to his feet, the loyal deputy again. "Still with us?"

"Yeah. How 'bout you?" Andy catches Jack's look and his meaning.

Casts a glance at the bodies. "Just making sure."

Jack nods okay. Ianto and Carys staring in silence at the two bullet-riddled teenagers on the front lawn.

The group heads down the road. Jack and Ianto share a private word about Andy who walks just ahead, the L-16 on his shoulder.

"He's infected." Ianto says in a hushed voice.

"You don't know that." Jack retorts and Ianto shakes his head.

"You saw what he did."

"He saved my life, that's what I saw." Jack snaps and Ianto sighs.

End of discussion.

Jack lengthens his stride to catch up with Andy.

It's hot and getting hotter.

One of those midsummer days where you feel the heat by 10 am.

Jack stops abruptly. "Goddammit."

He turns and looks back the way they came, cursing under his breath.

"I left the water at the house." Jack suddenly remembers.

"How far to the truck stop?" Ianto asks and Jack considers.

"Fifteen miles."

"What do we do?" Ianto asks, absently rubbing his stomach.

Andy grins at the sun. "We fry."

Andy takes off his shirt and walks on bare chested. Strong. Sinewy. Humming some 70's rock song to himself. Jack watches him, trying to gauge his sanity.

"I'd worry about her." Jack says to take Ianto's attention away from his deputy, indicates Carys, who has fallen behind.

Ianto goes back, checks on her. "You all right?"

"I feel sick." She whines.

"What kind of sick?" Ianto asks trying to appear unconcerned.

"Dizzy.

Ianto takes Carys by the elbow, helping her along. Just then a gunshot splits the silence.

Jack spins, where did that come from?

And before the group can orient themselves – another shot, closer than the first. They dive in the ditch as a truck comes four-wheeling across the field.

Three crazy rednecks in blood-soaked hunter vests howling out the windows, firing rifles.

Tied down across the hood is the body of Stephen.

Naked. Gutted like a deer.

Jack and the others stare numbly at this latest horror. The pickup tearing through an old barbed wire fence as it races off across the field.

Ianto resists the urge to throw up.

More walking.

More sweat.

Ianto, helping Carys as before, spots a hall set back from the highway on a dirt road.

An old beat-up hover parked in the lot.

"Jack." Ianto says softly. He nods, already spotted it. Andy doesn't seem to realize they've stopped and continues walking.

"What about him?" Ianto asks.

"Hey Andy."

Andy doesn't hear him, keeps walking.

"Andy!" Jack repeats louder.

Andy never turns, never slows. Jack watches, worried.

"Where he's going?" Ianto is shielding his eyes as he squints into the sunlight.

"Let's get the car." Jack turns and starts for the hall.

A white peaked-roof bingo hall sits alone on the prairie like a church without a steeple. Jack, Ianto and Carys cross the parking lot. A haunting voice echoes inside the building, stops them dead in their tracks.

"B-14..."

Jack and Ianto trade looks. He cocks his handgun and they continue toward the building.

They enter a carpeted lobby.

Framed pictures of happy winners on the wall. And here, a water fountain.

Carys, thirst-crazed, goes straight for it. Steps on the pedal. No water.

"Can't drink it anyway." Jack tells her softly and she slumps.

Carys releases the pedal. And now that haunting voice comes over the PA system:

"I-21..."

They all look to the set of double doors.

The doors seen from the other side as they open.

Jack, Ianto and Carys stepping through, warily, to scan the dark hall.

"G-47..."

Standing in the shadows at the far end, under the big illuminated Bingo flashboard, an old man is reading the numbers off ping pong balls as they fly up the chute into his hand from an electric blower-tumbler.

" That your car out front?" Jack calls out in a friendly manner, waking sure his badge is visible.

No reply, no acknowledgement whatsoever from the old timer. He reads another ball.

"N-32..."

They walk up the aisle toward him.

"Hey, is that your car out there?"

"O-67..."

"Can we borrow the keys?"

They stop ten feet away. The old man holds out his hand, palm downturned, as if to offer Jack something. A beat then - FSSHHTUNK - a ping pong ball flies up into it.

"I-29..."

Ianto spots someone in the shadows. There, sitting among the empty tables on the other side of the room - a fat man leans over a board

He walks over to him, Jack and Carys close behind.

"Excuse me, is that your …" he recoils in horror. The fat man is two days dead. Throat slit. Jaw gaping at his blood-caked Bingo card.


	18. Chapter 18

18

They all stand there for a moment processing the image.

A five-hundred pound corpse with a Bingo card. Rolls of decomposing fat overhanging the chair he's sitting in.

Owner of the Coupe De Ville?

Ianto steps closer.

Holding his breath at the stench, reminding himself he's a doctor, he slips his hand into the dead man's shirt pocket.

Empty.

Right pant pocket.

Empty.

Left side.

Empty.

He can't reach the back ones. He's sitting on them. "Help me lift him."

Startled looks of 'who us?' from Jack and Carys. A look in reply from Ianto, 'yes, you two'. They come over and take hold.

"On three. One... Two... Three!"

As they wrestle with the man's decomposing bulk, the dead weight shifts unexpectedly, slipping

"Shit, get back!" Jack yells and they jump back as the massive corpse goes crashing to the floor, the belly splits open on one side unleashing a torrent of blood and innards and liquefied fat. Ianto stands in that mess, repulsed.

Holds up his hand.

CAR KEYS.

They exit to find Andy sitting on the bumper of the Hover.

Pissed off, pouring sweat, L-16 across his lap. "Guys trying to ditch me?"

"Buddy, I called to ya, you kept walking. We were gonna pick you up down the road." Jack assures him.

Andy says nothing, dubious. Jack puts the keys in the ignition. Says a little prayer and gives it a try. The engine turns over twice and starts.

Empty highway.

The Hover comes into view at a cautious thirty miles an hour.

Jack drives, scanning the horizon for danger.

Ianto doing the same from the passenger seat.

Andy sits bare-chested in the back seat with Carys.

Whispers to her, paranoid "He called to me back there?"

"Twice."

"Loud enough to hear?"

"yeah."

"Then why didn't I hear him?" Andy asks confused.

Ianto shushes everybody. "Listen!"

They all go silent. And now we hear it, the sound of an oncoming drone.

Oh shit. They're sitting ducks out here.

Jack punches the gas.

A burst of acceleration followed by a sudden stop as he pulls the car off the road into the wash bay of an automated car wash.

Jack kills the engine, everybody pitching their ears to the fast-approaching roar overheard

VROOOM!

The drone comes screaming down the highway. Follows the road to its vanishing point. Gone. But the threat remains.

"We can't stay on the highway." Ianto whispers, his eyes wide.

"What would you recommend, dear?" Jack asks calmly.

"You said something about the power line road."

"We're five miles the other way now." Jack groans.

Carys, in the back, looks out the window and gasps as she sees watching them from the car wash lobby. "There's somebody in there."

"What? Where?" Jack twists in the seat to look.

"I saw someone." She points.

They all stare at the lobby. There's nobody there.

"Let's go." Ianto whispers and Jack reaches for the ignition, but before his hand gets there the wash roars into action.

The tracks engage the front bumper, yanking the car forward into the machine.

"Holy fuck!" Andy yelps.

"What's happening?!" Carys whimpers, trying to reach for Ianto.

"Somebody turned it on!" Jacks growls, turning to check that Andy has his weapon up.

An overhead spray nozzle sprays its residual water and then, soap splatters all over the windshield, blinding them.

"JACK, GET US OUT OF HERE!" Ianto screams with fear.

He starts the engine, punches the gas, but the hover, covered in pink slime, just screams in the tracks as it is still locked in. They'll have to ride it out.

"Goddammit!" Jack slams the wheel.

Ianto catches a glimpse of a face through the swirling machinery. "Over there!"

Jack and Andy spin to look, but their view is obstructed as spinning brushes swing into frame, whipping at the windows and body panels, flinging the pink soap off in gooey tendrils. And now Carys sees another figure out the back and she loses it. Jack whips his head around to see, but the brush comes spinning down off the roof and across the back window, blinding him.

Heightened terror.

All the windows covered in soap.

Carys, hysterical, crouching on the floor "I don't wanna die like this!"

Something zips past Andy's window. He freaks. Rolls it down and goes fully automatic with the L-16, spraying bullets everywhere. Jack and the others cover their ears, the deafening booms only adding to the terror.

"ANDY!" Jack roars.

Crazed, Andy keeps firing, empties the clip.

Tosses the spent weapon out the window. Rolls it up again.

Turning to tell Jack "I saw movement!"

"EVERYTHING'S FUCKING MOVING!" Jack is apocalyptic with rage.

A momentary calm as the brushes fold back. And then -

WHAM! –

The swinging dryer strips hit the windshield, making everybody jump. Jack fires a reflexive shot through the windshield, then steadies himself.

Ianto starts to giggle and claps his hand over his mouth, a tear escaping down his cheek.

The strips engulf the car, shimmying across the windows like living creatures. It's creepy. God knows what they conceal. Jack tries the gas again -

WHIRRRRRRRR.

We hear the engine is spinning.

Jack keeps them going, inching the car forward by that small coefficient of friction.

" Come on, come on, come on..." Jack mutters.

Suddenly, as they clear the tentacles -

CRASH!

The driver's side window explodes behind Jack's head, spraying the interior with glass fragments. Almost simultaneously the rear window smashes, a cinder block landing in the back seat.

A face flies in at Jack through his shattered window, teeth bared like a rabid dog. Jack deflects the bite to the steering wheel where it takes a chunk out of the rubber, exposing the steel below.

Jack counters with a vicious elbow that crushes the lunatic's nose and sends him reeling backwards against the wall. Another lunatic walks up onto the hood of the car, holding a cinder block above his head that is destined for the windshield.

Ianto screams, shielding his face. "JACK!"


	19. Chapter 19

19

CRASH!

The windshield shatters.

The car roof caves in as a third lunatic jumps on top and trampolines. And now the first lunatic is back at the window, a human pit bull, Jack barely holding him off by the throat as he starts the engine with his other hand.

The first lunatic lashes out, loops a hose around Jack's neck. A noose. The lunatic on the roof yanks it taut using the overhead swing arm as a winch to pry Jack out of the car.

Choking, head jammed against the ceiling, Jack throws the car into the reverse, creating slack in the hose. Ianto frantically unwinds it from his neck. Freed, Jack goes full throttle. The WHIRRRRRRR of the engine becomes a piercing SCREEEEEEECH as they catch the asphalt at the end of the tracks.

But at the last second, one of the lunatics loops the hose around Carys as the car peels out, the hose snaps taut and yanking her out the back window!

Ianto whips around screaming, jams his foot on the brake.

Jumps out and runs to Carys who is dangling from the swing arm. Jack and Andy jump out right behind him, dropping the attackers at close range.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Ianto grabs Carys around the torso, supporting her weight as he tries to get the hose from around her neck.

A desperate effort and a futile one.

The hose is too tight and she's dead.

Neck snapped.

Noosed by the high-pressure hose.

Jack comes over, turns Ianto away. He fights it and then reality hits. he hammers his fists on his chest in anger and then collapses against him in grief, sobbing.

Andy is on his knees looking up at his sister with shock.

Meanwhile the hover, left idling in neutral, rolls across the lot and comes to a stop in the road. It sits there idling as Ianto returns to Carys now, needing to get her down.

"Help me!" he sobs and Jack pulls his knife and cuts the hose.

Carys slumps into Ianto's arms.

Ianto cradles her down into a seated position, weeping over the girl's body.

Andy stands and turns in a small circle, totally confused. "Carys?"

It's here that the drone revisits them. Across the prairie to open fire on the exposed hover. Bullets strafe the car lengthwise.

It catches fire and burns.

They watch in silence.

Andy nodding to himself like a man reveling in God's authority.

Jack and Ianto's expressions edging toward doom. The smoke, blowing across their faces, paints Ianto's tears black.

They walk on. Ianto looks ready to give up. "They'll never let us in without testing us. I already failed that test once." 

"And you know why." Jack says softly, watching him out the corner of his eye.

"Oh Jesus, Jack. Even if you're right, how are we gonna prove it?" Ianto sobs.

"I'm feeling persuasive." Jack snarls.

Up ahead is a family hover wagon stopped by a spike strip. Jack checks the ignition as they walk up.

KEYS.

He reaches in, tries to start the engine.

"The bladder is flat." Ianto points out sadly.

"It'll drive on the rims." Jack says as the engine turns over, won't start. He pops the hood. All the wires have been cut.

"Bastards." He spits as he slams the hood down. Moment of despair. Jack looks wearily down the highway. Hears something behind them. A vehicle. There in the distance, coming fast.

"Move!" Jack barks and they all take cover behind the wagon. Here it comes, racing down the highway is the black hover.

"Maybe they'll help." Ianto goes to stand and Jack grabs him by the arm.

"Did you just block out the last seventy-two hours of your life? They're not even gonna stop." He hisses.

"Sure, they are." Andy whispers and with a deranged smile Andy kicks the buried stop spikes in the dirt behind the stopped wagon across the road.

It slams into them and goes airborne. Pieces fly off as it tumbles. A bumper. A door. It comes to rest on its side in the cornfield.

Andy goes jogging off toward it, rifle in hand.

Jack and Ianto in utter shock.

"If they're alive he'll kill 'em." Ianto shouts, running with Jack.

Jack takes off after Andy, hollering his name.

A nondescript man of fifty crawls from the wreckage. Buzzcut. Shattered gasmask hanging from his face. He's on his hands and knees, bleeding from the mouth, from a gash in his hairline.

Andy puts a gun to his head. "Welcome to Marsh County. Friendliest Place on Boeshane."

Jack runs up. Ianto behind.

"Let me talk to him!" Jack yells.

Andy mulls it over, gun on the guy's head.

Backs off.

"What did you people spill?" Jack demands and the Intelligence Officer spits blood, looks up at Jack, dazed, angry.

"Who the fuck are you?" he coughs.

"The guy standing between you and a bullet." Jack huffs.

The Intelligence Officer spits more blood then shifts painfully into a seated position. Pulls off the shattered gasmask. Tosses it aside.

" What were we exposed to?" Jack repeats.

After a moment, with a sigh of resignation "Zoonotic agent, rhabdoviridea prototype."

"Rhabdoviridea... You mean, rabies?" Ianto steps back as his medical knowledge gives him images he would rather not have.

"With a few alterations and enhancements." The man shrugs.

"What's he talking about?" Jack turns to his husband noting his horror.

"A weapon. A biological weapon."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, you guys engineered this crap?! You got any idea what it does to people?!" Jack looks around with despair.

"It does what it was designed to do. Destabilize a population. In this case, the wrong one." The man speaks in a monotone, "We lost a plane, fellas, what do you want me to say?"

"How about 'sorry for destroying your whole goddamn town'?!"

"Take it up with the pilot, I came down here to help!" the man huffs and Jack has no answer for that. The Intelligence Officer, like Stephen, defies the 'enemy' label, just another guy on a different side of the issue doing his job.

"What's the incubation period?" Ianto asks, calmly breathing deeply.

"Forty-eight hours. After that, you're either dead or you don't have it. But they're afraid it could go airborne. It's rare but it happens and they're not taking any chances."

"How rare?" he demands.

" One-in-a-million."

"You guys are gonna let us die here for one-in-a-million odds?" Jack gapes.

"When the risk is global pandemic? You're goddamn right. One carrier is all it takes. Nobody leaves." He snarls.

Grim silence. The Intelligence Officer struggles to his feet, leans wobbly-legged against the wreckage, somebody's husband, somebody's father, the beaten hero of his own story.

"For what it's worth, I …"

BANG!

His head jerks back as a bullet rips through his forehead. Andy just shot him from behind Jack.


	20. Chapter 20

20

"NOOO!" Jack screams.

Ianto is screaming too. Falls down as he staggers backwards. Has never seen someone shot at close range.

Jack grabs Andy two-fisted by the shirt and walks him backwards into the field, yelling in his face. "JACK WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU?! WHERE'S YOUR HEAD AT?! I SAID I WANTED TO TALK TO HIM!"

Andy holds Jack's stare, coldly indifferent. "You talked."

Andy shoulders his rifle and walks off, picking up a portable radio from the debris along the way. Jack watches him then helps Ianto to his feet.

Jack and Ianto walk the sun-scorched highway, eyes trained on Andy who walks fifty paces in front, a man to fear.

"I'll get the guns from him." Jack assures Ianto.

"What if he tries to stop you?" Ianto whispers.

Andy, out of earshot, glances back at them as if knowing their private thoughts. Turns forward again. And we get Jack's reply "He's a good kid, but I'll kill him if I have to."

Andy starts to jog. Jack and Ianto match his stride, maintaining that fifty-pace separation.

Abandoned filling station. Andy crosses the lot and goes inside. Jack and Ianto arrive moments later and follow him. Tense. Moment of truth.

Jack and Ianto enter. On the far wall is a cooler filled with bottled water. Andy tosses them both a bottle.

"Thanks." Jack nods and Andy exits without a word. Steps outside and pours an entire bottle over his head. Opens a second bottle and sits down drinking it on the concrete median by the pumps.

Jack and Ianto guzzle, the excess water running down their necks. Both watching Andy through the window as he scans channels on the military radio.

STATIC.

He puts the radio down and heads for the men's room. Jack sees Andy's mistake.

The radio, and guns, sitting by the pumps.

Andy, at the urinal, flushes, zips, steps to the sink where he blows his nose into his handkerchief.

He tucks it away, seemingly unaware of the blood he has just filled the cloth with. Stares at himself in the cracked mirror. Dead-eyed. Sweat riveting down his cheeks.

Madness.

Andy exits. Sees his guns are gone. Flushing with rage, he crosses to Jack, who has them.

"I'm gonna need those back." Andy snarls.

" I'll carry 'em for a while. You've been carrying 'em the whole time." Jack tries to bluster his way through it.

"Yeah, thanks anyway." Andy reaches for them.

Jack shakes his head, stony. "I got 'em."

"You sure about that?"

"Yeah." Jack answers with a nervous smile.

Andy nods, nods again, then draws from behind his back a spare handgun. Jack is hopelessly outdrawn.

Ianto white with terror. "Andy, we're on your side..."

"My side? I didn't even know there was sides." He turns to Ianto.

"There's not, I didn't –"

"Tell him to shut up."

Jack gestures. Ianto stops talking. Andy presses the gun to Jack's chest.

"ANDY, NO!" Ianto begs.

"TELL HIM TO SHUT HIS MOUTH OR I'LL KILL HIM TOO!"

JACK (to Ianto while looking at Andy) "Stop talking. Let him think about what he's doing."

Andy stares Jack in the face. Finger on the trigger. Taps him bluntly on the chest with the barrel.

One... (taps him again)

Two... (taps him again)

Three!

You're waiting for the gunshot but Andy just shakes his head in reproach. "That's how many times I saved your life."

Andy, who now has all the guns, gestures down the road with his revolver. "Out in front where I can see you."

Jack and Ianto start down the road, Andy behind them. They talk under their breath.

"Let's just run." Ianto whispers.

" Give him a target he'll hit it. Let me think a minute." Jack sighs.

They walk on, weighing their options. And Jack realizes. They have none.

"Fuck it, I'm gonna confront him." Jack turns and Ianto grabs at him.

"Jack, no"

" We don't get to that truck stop we're dead anyway."

He walks back toward Andy. Andy raises the L-16. "Back off."

"I want to talk to you."

"BACK OFF!" Andy takes aim at Jack's face.

"Just wanna talk."

"JACK, STOP!" Ianto is screaming with fear

"Put the gun down." Jack says softly.

Andy tightens on the trigger.

"You better listen to me." Andy warns.

"JACK!" Ianto sobs, pulling at his hair.

"Put it down." Jack speaks even quieter, no fear in his face.

"FINAL WARNING, CHIEF!"

"I just want to talk to you." Jack speaks like they are having a cup of coffee.

Jack walks right up to him. The L-16 pointed at his throat. Andy staring down the barrel.

"Can we talk? Man to man?"

A long tense moment then Andy lowers his weapon.

"Okay. Here's the deal …" Jack punches him square in the face, lays him out flat. Andy, dazed, offers no resistance as Jack quietly disarms him, just stares at the sky like he's daydreaming:

"Remember that monster catfish I caught last summer?" Andy speaks in a dreamlike fashion.

"Yeah." Jack says, checking his pockets.

"What'd he weigh, you reckon?" Andy is watching the dome shimmer.

" Ten fifteen pounds." Jack shrugs.

Faint smile from Andy. "Big son of a bitch."

Ianto arrives, his shadow falling across Andy who sits up now, semi-lucid, the sucker punch helping clear his head.

"I'm not right, am I?" Andy whines.

Jack shakes his head no. Andy nods in confirmation.

Unexpectedly, his voice cracks with emotion. "Can I keep walking with you guys? Little while longer?"

Jack trades looks with Ianto.

They're jogging again. Andy struggling to keep up. Ianto drinks from a water bottle, passes it to Jack. He finishes it, tosses it. And before the bottle hits the ground - he grabs him and pull him into the tall grass.

They peer through it. Both crouching.

TWO MILITARY TRUCKS butted together form a checkpoint two hundred yards down the road.

No way past.

Andy arrives beside them, huffing. Sizes up the checkpoint. Indicates a route through the adjoining field. "Cut through there, you can pick up the highway on the other side."

"They'll see us." Jack points out.

"They'll be focusin' on me." Andy snorts and Jack looks at Andy. He's offering to sacrifice himself.

"Deputy does what the sheriff tells him. You're the sheriff."

Permission.

Jack can't give it. Andy holds out his hand for a gun.

"I'm done, chief, let me go out big."

Moment of deliberation then Jack puts the revolver in Andy's hand, making sure it's fully loaded. A beat and then he gives him the shotgun as well, pumping his last shells into the chamber. Gun in each hand, Andy eyes the checkpoint.

Steeling himself.

Looks at Jack one last time.

"Hoo-fuckin'-yah."

And takes off through the field toward the checkpoint. We run with him, immersed in the sounds - the swishing grass, his pounding steps, and the rock song he's singing under his breath to psych himself up ("Walk This Way"):

"Met a cheerleader was a real young bleeder oh the times I could reminisce, 'Cause the best things of lovin' with her sister and her cousin only started with a little kiss, like this..."

He opens fire, veering out of the field in a dead sprint at the checkpoint. Takes out four of the six soldiers before they gun him down.

The remaining soldiers gather around Andy's body.


	21. Chapter 21

21

Jack and Ianto running to safety through the opposite field.

A road sign.

Quik Phil's Truck stop 1/2 MILE.

Jack and Ianto lengthen their strides.

"Come on. We're there babe." Jack pants.

Jack and Ianto slow as they reach the parking lot, anticipation turning to dread.

The truck stop is abandoned. A ghost town. They kick aside the temporary fencing and walk across the empty parking lot. It's strewn with litter like a state fairground at the end of the season.

"It was Grand Central last night." Jack says as he kicks at an empty wrapper.

"They must have gotten everybody out."

"In what...?" Jack points at the buses parked in the same spot as before. And booted, like the cars in town, to prevent driving. It's eerily quiet. Which makes the one sound they do hear all the more ominous.

A steady hum from the far side of the parking lot where three refrigerated transporters sat. Jack and Ianto exchange a grim look.

Seventy-footers. Back doors padlocked. Refrigeration units humming. Jack breaks open a padlock using the shotgun as a pry arm.

Swings open the door... lifeless arms flop out. Green bracelets on display.

Jack and Ianto stare in disbelief. Their faces tell the story.

"They weren't even sick..." Ianto whispers.

Jack picks something up off the ground.

A handful of artillery. He looked at it then looked around "Nobody leaves."

He flings them across the parking lot in disgust.

A trash can shatters the glass door. Jack and Ianto step through and survey the deserted truck stop. Slot machines glimmer multi-colored in the darkness.

Jack and Ianto lean over a map in the empty restaurant. The soft hiss of static on the military radio.

"We don't get outta here nobody's ever gonna know what happened." Jack says and Ianto rubs his face, so damn tired.

"They wiped out an entire town." He asks Jack "What are they going to say?"

"Whatever they want. " Jack points on the map, "All these roads are gonna be blocked."

Ianto yawns and Jakc looks up, "you look beat. Let's lock ourselves in the office out back and catch some sleep before we go forward... Just a couple of hours. Once it's fully dark we can move about a bit safer too."

Ianto nods and stumbles that way as Jack reached around the counter for some food. Armed with packets of crisps, jerky and pickles Jack followed, glad to find a day bed in there.

Ianto was bending over, pulling at the bed when Jack drops the food and slides his hands around those lovely hips.

"Not now Cariad" Ianto growled, "I'm filthy."

"Terrible" Jack whispers, swinging him around and kissing him gently.

Ianto sighed and let himself go limp as Jack palmed his tented jeans that were betraying his need.

Jack knew Ianto wouldn't sleep. Would lay there going over and over things. He needed a distraction to resent his mind and slide him into sleep.

Ianto feels Jack's hands slowly move around his waist, slide down his ass, finding the flesh at the base of his shorts and sliding inside, he felt the heat of his hand sliding up teasing the core of his body that clearly welcomed the invasion of his touch.

"Ianto, let go baby" His voice is low, deep, and seductive as his fingertips glide along the heat of him, as short breaths begin to leave Ianto explosively.

His hands started to move in slow circles against that tiny tight ball of nerves, the ones that sent erotic sensations through his entire body - that electrified him

A sexy little smirk on Jack's lips when he sees how hooded Ianto's eyes become, when he feets how slick the heat of him is becoming with the lube from his pocket.

That sensual smirk of his is damn near irresistible.

Another finger slips in, as Ianto arches toward him.

As they kiss Ianto's hand on Jack's chest slides up.

"What do you want?" Jack whispers as he presses his body against Ianto showing him exactly what he wants, as his fingers bore deeper within.

Ianto gasps looked down, lets their foreheads meet "I want you to tell me this is a bad dream. Tell me she's still here. Tell me David is coming around later to paint the barn."

Jack squints his eyes closed feeling his pain, knowing as ready as his body was his mind was not letting go right now. Slowly he lets his hands rise then ease through Ianto's hair, cradling his head against him.

Jack wants to defend him, he wants something to fight, something he could destroy, but he can't fight Ianto's own mind, it couldn't understand all that he had witnessed in the last few days.

"I can't do that, baby," he says as he lifts Ianto's head so their eyes meet "But I will not let you down."

Before Ianto could whisper a protest, Jack's lips were on his. At first it is a slow kiss ripe with command, melding their lips, but then Ianto feels him pouring all that he has into that kiss, Ianto's embrace becomes hungry.

Ianto reaches his arms up around Jack's shoulders and pulls him closer, rocking against him. In his hands, no matter where they went, he feels a hum behind them, feels his focused energy absorbing into him.

Ianto's head flies back as Jack's lips ease down his neck.

The grief was still present, the hell of this week is, but he feels the flood of energy moving back into him.

Jack slides his hands down his chest searching for his belt, he pulled his kiss away. "Better?" he breathed against Ianto's face.

Ianto's hands finally slip beneath the only garment between them. Jack groans as that hand runs the length of him.

"I want to make you hum," Ianto whispers as his eyes become hooded with every stroke of his hand.

Jack claimed his lips then, rocked his body against his, moaned when he felt those deft fingers began to usher him toward another cliff of ecstasy.

Ianto feels his legs began to grow weary.

Jack pushes Ianto's shorts and down past his hips, to the point where they could fall to the floor on their own, then he leans Ianto back against the arm of the sofa. His kiss begins to slide down Ianto's chest, pausing at the small mound of stomach.

Ianto's breaths become fast and heated long before he feels Jack's kiss slide across his length, dare to nip at it.

Ianto feels the sweet sensation of Jack's lips caressing the most aching part of his body.

It was all that he could do to stand.

Ianto feels pure fire—and Jack is in control, knows exactly what rhythm will drive Ianto up the wall, what he likes and doesn't. He enjoys making Ianto wait for what he wants. He'll bring him to the edge then glide his tongue away, a tease, one that nearly infuriates him.

"Cariad," Ianto moans as he feels himself build and begin to shake. Tease or not, he has hit that mark enough times that Ianto is on the verge.

"Let go," Jack's lips hum against his flesh.

He shook his head no, even moving his legs together around him. He wants to stay on that edge, and when he falls over it he doesn't want to fall over it alone.

Jack knows that. This is a game to him, that part of it anyway; Ianto wants to cum with him, like always. Not alone, never alone.

As Jack rose, his hand slides down Ianto's stomach once more, right as his fingertip begin to taunt

the edge he was doing his best to cling to.

Ianto can feel the hard length of Jack pressing against his inner thigh.

"Want," Ianto whispers as soon as the thought registers.

"I'm not convinced…a bit too much delay," Jack grins as his fingers slide further then dive back inside swift and hard. The moan that left Ianto sounds more like a shriek of shock.

Jack's hand urges Ianto's legs apart seconds before he pushes himself deep inside, ensuring his thrust was quick and to the point. One hand reaches around Ianto's waist and canted his hips more, letting them slide into that familiar seating.

Jack's powerful body moves at a rapid rhythm against Ianto, every touch and every thrust brings a raw ache to him. Thrust after thrust, the way he hooks Ianto's hips so he could get nice and deep, how

he only gave him a second before he moves again.

All at once that cliff Ianto has been avoiding swallows him whole. He feels his entire body convulse, his legs shake, and the sweet agony of release shakes him to the core.

Jack takes his time but he follows. Hearing him grunt out a curse as his hands clenched Ianto waist was pure satisfaction for them both.

They sleep.

Jack rouses Ianto four hours later and is chastised for letting them sleep so long. Then a soft kiss and a clean up. Both men changing some of their clothes for some from the lost and found.

They grab supplies. Bottled water. Chocolate bars. Hats and sunglasses from a display rack as they exit.


	22. Chapter 22

22

The two men come down the hall toward the main entrance.

"Thirty miles to Wichy. On foot, avoiding main roads, we'll average maybe three four miles an hour. That gets us there by daybreak." Jack is saying when a noise stops them.

Came from just around the corner.

There is it again.

The sound of a token clicking through a payphone, being taken from the return slot and reinserted at the top where it tumbles down again and again and again.

Jack motions for Ianto to remain silent and perfectly still.

Tiptoes to the corner.

Peers around it.

Sitting in one of those private pay phone stalls with his back to him is a beast of a man, a giant Truckie in a blood-stained tank-top. The blood is his own, seeping from a gunshot he took in the chest and didn't die from.

Jack ducks back around the corner.

Holy shit.

He turns back to Ianto, motioning for him to head back the opposite direction.

But just then the token tumbles through again, this time followed by the ominous sound of it rolling across the floor and it rolls into view and goes into one of those lazy spins in front of Jack and Ianto.

A stunned pause then they start backing away.

Quickly and quietly as possible.

The token spinning faster and faster.

The truck driver's footsteps approaching.

He comes around the corner, looks up from the coin at Jack and Ianto.

His face is grotesque, one side dead and the other in jerking spasms as his moith peels back to show the yellowed teeth and gums.

As he stands there staring at them

BANG!

He takes a bullet in the side of the head. Gore sprays from the exit wound. He falls and they hear excited yelling down the hall.

In one of those corner-mounted security mirrors, Jack and Ianto see who fired the shot. Those hunters who killed Stephen.

Trudging down the hall in their blood-soaked orange vests. Jack gestures for Ianto to back up fast. Ianto does and he follows him, the two of them retreating into the café area and immediately they are forced to hit the floor as the truck driven by the third hunter pulls up right outside the windows, the back of it heaped with bodies. Jack and Ianto, flat on their stomachs, draw quick terrified breaths.

"Did he see us?" Ianto hisses.

"I don't know. We gotta move." They crawl across the carpet toward the far side of the restaurant.

The two hunters drag the dead truck driver out by his ankles and heave his body up onto the pile. The third hunter toots the horn in celebration of the kill.

Jack and Ianto crawl behind the counter, through a swinging door into the kitchen. They pause just inside, breathless with fear. Jack, steadying the swinging door with his fingertips, trying to think what to do next.

"Maybe they'll leave." Ianto whispers and Jack gives him a doubtful look, steals a peek through the window in the door.

"Truck's still there."

The driver's seat is empty. No sign of the hunters anywhere. Until they all enter the café guffawing, guns leveled, looking for prey.

"Fuck." Jack ducks down. Scans the kitchen. No visible exits. They're trapped.

"Where are they?" Ianto hisses and Jack gestures 'right there, shhhhh.' He peers through the crack in the door, watching as the hunters search the restaurant, looking under tables, working their way through the seating area toward the kitchen. One of them slips out of view as they approach.

"They're coming." Jack mutters

Jack and Ianto retreat toward the back of the kitchen. Jack grabs a couple of knives as they pass the cook's station, hands one to Ianto. They hide around a corner, flatten themselves against the wall, Jack with a finger to his lips telling Ianto not to make a sound.

And now the doors swing open. The two hunters enter. We hear their heavy boot steps. The treads leaving bloody footprints on the tiles. They make their way past the cook's station and the sink to the corner where the two men are hiding.

Here they pause, as if sensing their prey, and then, together, whip around the corner, guns up.

Jack and Ianto are gone.

But where?

We find them around the next corner, their final fallback position. They listen, clutching the knives, to the advancing hunters. In the final seconds Jack sees a door ten feet away. Fire exit. Can they make it? He motions to Ianto. They go for it. Slip through.

Stop dead in their tracks on the other side. Standing right in front of them is the third hunter.

With an excited grunt he puts the gun in Jack's face and pulls the trigger.

CLICK!

Idiot forgot to reload. Jack drives the knife into his neck and leaves it there as he and Ianto take off down the hall. The hunter drops to his knees, puking up handfuls of blood.

The other two hunters explode through the door and open fire. Jack and Ianto run for their lives. The hunters in hot pursuit, galloping along in their bloody boots.

Jack and Ianto cut through an arcade. Pinball machines and slot machines flying past in a blur.

BOOM!

A shotgun blast vaporizes a Pac man machine.

They exit the arcade into a hallway with one flickering fluorescent light. Jack grabs door handles as they run, looking for an exit. This one opens.

A cleaning closet.

Shit.

They run on.

Desperate.

Gunshots chasing them around the corners.

The hunters closing in.

Nowhere to run.

Except this last door.

Jack yanks it open. He and Ianto race through, down a hallway lined with vending machines and chairs that widens into a lobby of some sort.

Another door opens.

Jack and Ianto, charging through, find themselves in the cavernous work area where they service the rigs. Jack locks the door behind them. A temporary respite because a glass window looks in from the lobby. As soon as they see it, the two hunters are there.

Jack spins, sees a hover-rig elevated six feet off the ground in a hydro lift.

On the wall nearby are a dozen sets of keys.

Jack lunges, grabs them. "Climb!"

Scaling tool chests and oil drums, Jack and Ianto climb up to the elevated truck cab as the hunters smash the glass and try to climb through, entering the garage.

Jack and Ianto dive inside the cab as shotgun blasts pulverize the doors. The hunters keep shooting, emptying their guns at the elevated rig.

When they stop to reload Jack and Ianto, crouched on the floor, seize the moment.

"Lock 'em!" Jack yells as they both lock their doors and crouch back down, bracing themselves for another assault. But there are no more gunshots. Not yet. What they hear instead are tools spilling across the floor.

"Oh my God, they're climbing up!" Ianto wails with fear.

Jack jumps into the driver's seat as the first hunter climbs into view. He meets Jack's gaze with a murderous grin.

Aims his shotgun at the glass.


	23. Chapter 23

23

Jack kicks his door open, sending the hunter flying off to the floor below where his head with a sickening thud.

Undeterred, he starts climbing back up. The second hunter is scaling the tool chests ahead of him.

But Jack sees something far more terrifying than these two as the third hunter climbs in through the lobby window. Knife still embedded in his neck, blood pouring from the wound, he glares up at Jack in the truck then starts looking around for something.

Sees it over there on the wall.

The release button.

Jack reads his intention, tosses Ianto the keys.

No time to waste. "See if any of those work!"

Ianto starts trying them in the ignition, one after another, tossing the useless sets aside.

The Third Hunter could just press the release button, but decides to shoot it instead. Blows the entire switch assembly off the wall.

No luck.

So the Third Hunter walks over under the truck and starts firing randomly into the sub-floor mechanics of the lift itself.

He finally hits some vital part, not anticipating the outcome.

With a giant whoosh the entire lift drops like a stone.

Ianto screams in freefall.

The rig and lift squashes the third Hunter beneath with a sickening noise.

The other two hunters find this mishap hilarious, shrieking with laughter.

A strange interlude.

Ianto desperately fishing around on the floor.

"What are you doing?!" Jack yells at him.

"I dropped the keys!" Ianto wails as his hands shake and he drops some again.

Jack bends to help.

Something hits the windshield like a sledgehammer.

The first hunter is standing on the bonnet with a huge wrench, eating at the windscreen with guttural snarls.

Devastating blows.

Each impact spackles the glass more, sending pebbled fragments flying back at Jack's and Ianto's faces.

Ianto trying whatever keys he can find. "None of them work!"

WHAM!

More pebbled fragments flying back at them. Ianto, ducking it, fishes around on the floor for more keys.

Finds another set.

Tries them. No good.

"Hurry!" Jack barks as he looks around for a weapon.

"I can't find them!" Ianto is frantic and fishes around under the seat. Finds another set. Jams them in the ignition and the engine roars to life.

Jack lets out a howl. "YEEEAH!"

Throws the rig into gear and with the air horn blasting and the rig comes crashing out through the garage door. The rig tears off across the parking lot with the redneck hunters staggering after it on foot.

Speeding down the highway.

Pulses pounding.

Ianto unfolds a map from the glove box. "The smallest straightest road to Wichy."

"Perfect." Jack snarls.

"The truck races down a country lane, a big moonlit dust cloud rising in its wake."

Ianto fiddles with the radio, picks up a faint signal. "What was that?"

He fiddles some more. Snippets of military communications becoming audible through the background static…

MILITARY COM ...Fifty-nine... (STATIC) ...fifty-five...fifty-four... (STATIC) ...fifty-one...fifty...

Ianto and Jack turn slowly to look at one another. Haunted by the same question.

"What happens at zero?" Ianto whispers with wide eyes.

Jack floors the gas pedal.

...forty-five...forty-four... (STATIC) ...forty-two...

The truck barrels down the quiet country road.

...thirty-six...thirty-five...

Jack and Ianto race on, rigid with fear.

The dark countryside shooting past the windows.

...thirty...twenty-nine...twenty eight...

Ianto scrambles into the sleeper compartment, watching out the back window.

twenty...nineteen...eighteen... seventeen...sixteen...

The road is receding toward the black horizon.

"FASTER!" Ianto slaps the back of the seat as he screams, his fear filling the cab of the rig with a sweet smell.

"That's everything!" Jack yells, his foot flat on the floor as he grinds his teeth.

The eyes of frightened horses jumping back from a roadside fence as the truck flies past.

...twelve...eleven...

Jack's white-knuckled grip on the wheel. Ianto's face pressed against the back window. That ominous voice on the radio:

...ten...nine...eight...

The road flying toward us out of darkness.

...five...

Jack's face.

...four...

Ianto's face.

...three...

Ianto reaching over, gripping Jack's shoulder.

...two...

Jack gripping his hand.

...one...

Zero.


	24. Chapter 24

24

Ianto staring out.

Jack craning his neck.

"Anything?"

Ianto silent, waiting, staring.

"Anything?!" Jack repeats.

"No..."

"Nothing?" Jack cranes to see in the rearview mirror.

Just the black horizon.

Ianto, baffled, meets eyes with Jack in the rear view mirror.

"Nothing Cariad"

And then it hits.

The blinding white detonation of a nuclear device rips a hole in the night sky and the dome above them pulses as the safety dome slams over the tear.

Searing white light fills the cab.

Ianto watching the blast through his fingers. "Oh my God..."

Jack is screaming "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!"

Jack, bone-chilled, looks out his side window, sees an invisible shockwave rolling across the ground behind them, sweeping over eerily backlit barns and houses.

"GET DOWN!" Jack yells and the shockwave wallops the truck like a punch from God, pitching it forward on the front bumper.

Through the windshield we see the shockwave go shooting past us down the highway, Mach One, its vacuum sucking out the rig's side windows

BOOSH!

The truck falls back onto its rear edges, popping the bladder.

Jack wrestles the rig under control, steers it onto the shoulder, the metal undercarriage grinding on the road.

The initial blinding burst dims to a strange red half light as the emergency dome turns red to register the breech.

Ianto looks back and sees the aftermath, a world of fire and smoke and swirling ashes, A mile-wide grain field engulfed in flames.

Jack and Ianto stare in speechless horror.

Noise crackling on the military radio like the countdown never happened.

Jack and Ianto trudge through waist-high grass. Sun pinking the sky in the east. Wichy on the near horizon.

Looks of hope.

People.

Traffic.

Life as normal.

Jack and Ianto walk up a commercial street in the trucker hats and sunglasses they took from Quik Phil's.

Greasy spoon. Full of people. Jack sits at the counter in his trucker hat and sunglasses. Quiet. Inconspicuous. Ianto is on the pay phone in the back. He hangs up, comes over and sits on the stool beside Jack.

"My parents are coming to get us."

Jack holds his reply as the waitress steps up, pen poised to take their order.

"What'll it be?"

"Couple waters." Jack says quietly as Ianto rubs his stomach and grimaces.

"That it?" the waitress asks with surprise.

He nods, catches her hand as she turns. "Bottled."

She nods okay.

On a TV above the counter, regular programming is interrupted by a SPECIAL NEWS UPDATE. Patrons look up from their meals with the concern one feels for a neighboring community.

 _NEWS UPDATE Casualties continue to mount following a devastating explosion at a chemical plant in rural Kansas. The Marsh, a farming community of some four hundred families, is believed to have been leveled in the blast. Authorities continue to search for survivors, but hold out little hope. More as this tragic story unfolds..._

The official version of events. Jack watches in disgust.

Ianto in disbelief, stating the obvious "That's not what happened."

The waitress brings the waters and the check. As Jack reaches for the bottles, he pauses, noticing something.

Ianto is smiling, his hands spread over the mound as he looks up at Jack with wonder.

"It moved"

"What?" Jack is moving over to replace Ianto's hands with his own.

"Wait."

Jack grins.

He will wait forever.

END


End file.
